


Mistakes, Accidents, Miracles and Disasters

by MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)



Series: Blood Screaming [4]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Car Accidents, Digging Up Graves, Dubious Consent, Episode: s02e18 Killed by Death, Flaming Vamires, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Head Injury, Masturbation, Miracles, Multi, Mutual Masturbation, Mystery, Older Man/Younger Woman, Older Woman/Younger Man, Prayer, Revenge Sex, Sexual Fantasy, Stake through the heart, Subtext, Subtext Becoming Text, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vaginal Sex, Vampires, Werewolves, epidemic, sexual innuendo, watchers council - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:10:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1271038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong with Buffy's quest for emergency contraception.  Now her mission to help Willow in her time of grief could have even more dire consequences even as the mission itself goes surprisingly right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Unpleasant Side Effects of Betrayal

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lady's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223416) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 
  * Inspired by [Who Do You Think You Are?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235281) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



> This is contemporaneous, more or less with chapters 4, 5 & 6 of Lady's Choice, but this is the point where Blood Screaming really takes off in it's own direction. In the show chronology, it would be between s02 e17 "Passion" and s02 e18 "Killed by Death".
> 
> For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles wrestles with his feelings for Jenny and Buffy and with the facts of what he has and has not done to each of them. Oz confronts Giles. Joyce and Sheila deal very differently with Buffy and Willow's arrest. Helena (OC) puts her plan for vengeance into action.

Sunnydale, CA, February 23, 1998

 

On Monday, Giles was up and hard at it in the library before dawn came.  At least he wanted to be hard at it.  He tried to bury himself in his work, but he couldn’t sustain the enthusiasm to carry through any sort of action. Three miles away, at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery, the womb of the Earth had been breached to admit the mortal remains of Jenny Calendar. He had not been allowed to come. “There are reasons,” Jenny’s aunt had explained darkly, piously, “why the Kalderash and the Councilmen stay out of one another’s business.” There was an unspoken sense that death was what any woman could expect of getting involved with the likes of him. By force of will he pushed from his mind the images of his fallen Slayers and of the torn and savaged body of Celeste Pummil.

“God! What fools these mortals be!” Giles murmured, choking on the ashes of all the days he’d burned stoking his righteous anger at Jenny for failing to open her deepest secrets to him. When a woman, _the_ woman, says to a man that she loves him and that if only she could get right with him she would be right with the world, what an ass he must be to say anything but ‘all is forgiven!’ What a fool he had been even on the last day of Jenny’s life, at the moment of his triumphant surrender, merely to smile and hint that there would be a time and place for their love soon enough! It had not come soon enough. Never again would he hold her, never touch her hair, never kiss her lips this side of heaven or hell. He would never make love to her even once as he should have done again and again and again, every day and twice on Sunday for the past twelve months. Because he had thought that it could wait!

He should have known better. He should have grabbed her and fucked her where she stood! If he’d have done that, he’d have still been with her when Angelus came. He might have saved her. He might at least have died trying! And even if she had died and he had lived, it would have been the right thing to do. It would have made a fact of truth. They would have been lovers forever if he but once had been inside her.

Because he had never laid her down on his bed, or the floor of her classroom or the damned and bloody ground, had never pealed the clothing from her body like the wilted outer petals of a flower, had never spread her thighs and gazed upon the beauty and the mystery of her most sacred place, had never tasted the acid tang of her cunt, never thrust her open with the wood hard shaft of his penis, never poured forth his life into her in the holy sacrament of orgasm; the universe was poorer, less as it should be. In his excessive moderation, his reckless caution, his ridiculous dignity, he had robbed her, robbed them both, of what should have been the ecstasy of that most perfect union. Confused though he was by his feelings for Buffy, Giles was certain of Jenny. She was the one and always would be. But she would always be gone.

And that still, small voice that told him _Buffy_ was ‘the one’ too? Could the sun rise and set at the same time? No! It could not be! He had spread Buffy open and impaled her on his broad cock, had poured himself into the heart of her, only out of his frustrated desire for Jenny. What his depraved heart now wanted to call ‘love’ was mere transference. Or a convenient self-justification for the crimes of lust. It would fade away. It would dwindle in perspective. And if not? God help him! A Watcher in love with his Slayer? There was nothing poetic about that. It was worse than maudlin. It was... insoluble.

The mere fact that he had made love to Buffy was an unsalvageable disaster. The universe was forever less or more or other than it should have been because he once had been inside her. As if that were not horror enough, some unfathomably small portion of him remained inside her still, some microscopic germ of information in that sacred alphabet comprised of four letters wherein was writ the revelation of his doom: “Thou hast fucked thy Slayer and thou shalt surely be the father of thine own destruction!”

A mere second’s contemplation of what might happen if Buffy actually bore his child was enough to make him feel truly ill. From the Council’s point of view, Buffy was meant to be a martyr, not a mother. She was to remain a living sacrifice. Until she became the dying kind. If they ever decided that she’d lost sight of what mattered, if they ever felt that she was in danger of betraying her sacred calling, if they thought their lamb was ‘crawling off the altar’...

An image forced itself upon Rupert’s memory: _A young woman, her dark hair hanging down across her pale face against the good green table cloth in the big dining room downstairs. Her cloudy green eyes looking through him at nothing_. _Her voice, singing, calling him, now silent. His father’s loud voice and angry eyes. “Hush, Child,” Grandmother says, “Go back to bed, it’s alright.”_ He pushed the recollection back where it had come from the way he always did. Never saw it. Never heard it. Never say a word.

Giles reached a trembling hand into his jacket pocket and fingered the tiny packet within, reassuring himself that it was still there and would surely abate the need of any such... maudlin poetics. Even if some rogue particles of himself were still radiating through Buffy’s body seeking the means of fusion and of fission, to collide and join with her own particles then split again, starting a chain reaction that would bring worlds to their ends; he now had the means to disarm them. Surely Buffy would be released today, would come to school, would seek him out. If not, he would have to find a way to deliver the goods to her. He resisted the urge to call her home again. He had left three messages already, at least two too many. One more would show a level of concern uncreditable in anyone but a lover. Or a parent.

The last he had heard, from Xander,as of Sunday night, twenty-four hours after he had left Buffy naked, injured and incapacitated with drink at the Pacific Coast Motor Lodge, she and Willow _were still_ being held for ‘questioning.’ Giles was no expert in American law, but that struck him as much too long. Unless the police actually were trying to force a confession to murder from their lips.

Giles racked his brains, trying once again to think of something, anything he could do for the two girls that would help and not hurt them. He was frustrated by a lack of knowledge. If they were to be charged with murder, his testimony as to what they were really doing in that bathroom could be essential. But if they were ‘only' being charged with forging a prescription, he would be doing nothing but confirm their guilt by exposing himself to prosecution. Nonetheless, he grappled with the injustice of Buffy and especially Willow being punished on account of his failure to restrain his cock while he seemed certain to get off.

Of course, it had been touch and go at that. His sturdy and serviceable Citron was hardly built for speed. So he’d hotwired a sporty little red number instead. With silent apologies to his latest victim, he had gently eased out of the parking lot, emerged onto the two lane blacktop at a measured pace, put two or three miles between himself and the motel, then drove as hard and fast as he could into the vestibule of hell. When he’d gotten all the use he could from the stolen vehicle, he’d dumped it in the alley behind Willy’s Bar, exactly as he imagined Angel might have done, wiped away the evidence of his invasion and sprinted home through the mean back streets of Sunnydale. His own car had been impounded for evidence, having supposedly been an instrument of criminal abduction.

In the clear light of day, he realized he hadn’t done Buffy any favors. She might just as well have gone straight to the police as to have hidden in a motel only a few miles away. The only difference being that they would each be guilty of a few less crimes and the lies they had to tell would’ve been simpler. And he might not have learned that he was perfectly capable of abandoning Buffy to save himself.

****

“Come on honey,” Joyce was able to say at last,“let’s go home.” She had been at Buffy’s side through one nauseous, interminable night in the hospital and a still longer day and night of intermittently intense ‘voluntary questioning’ by every law enforcement officer in Del Bacco County and a State Police polygraph examiner who’d come down specially from San Diego. After he’d repeatedly challenged Buffy on her ‘deceptive’ responses about Angel, she’d told him with a straight face that Angel was a 240 year-old vampire who had killed literally thousands of people and that she’d fucked him to the point of such ecstasy that it had destroyed his very soul. When both claims scored as one hundred percent honest, he had resigned in frustration. It had been strongly hinted that if ‘voluntary questioning’ didn’t get the cops what they wanted soon, they were ready to break out the shackles. But evidently they had finally admitted defeat, declaring that they had learned everything about the murders that they expected to from Buffy and Willow and that they were not prepared to charge either of them. Not that they didn’t still believe the girls were involved, they just couldn’t prove it.

Joyce knew Buffy was lying about her sojourn at the Pacific Coast Motor Lodge. She’d told Xander she was ‘safe’ long before she had been ‘rescued’. She’d also told the police that Angel was with her at the motel until well past the time of his assault on the house. Clearly he had been gone long enough for Buffy to have left the motel if it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Joyce tried not to parse this fact too closely. It was hard enough being forced to show herself a liar and a fool by contradicting her earlier identification of Angel. She didn’t want to think about the fact that she had raised a daughter who would willingly subject herself to the sexual attentions of a monstrous, dead-eyed, raper of corpses in the name of ‘love’. Not that anyone could ‘prove’ that either. Buffy had adamantly refused to have anything but her leg examined insisting that Angel had kidnapped and battered her but never laid a hand or anything else on her in a sexual way, no matter how many witnesses confirmed that she had lost a pair of torn panties while crawling through the ceiling of the Mall Twin Theater with Angel at a time when he was clearly still holding Dr. Rosenberg hostage.

Not all of the questioning had been so fruitless. Both girls had readily confessed to stealing the prescription pad, each claiming the transgression as her own. Apparently, they had had the bright idea to put _themselves_ on the Pill without telling their parents they were having sex. Once it was clear that had nothing to do with the murders, no more had been said about it. Confident that that part of the ordeal was over, they’d just emerged from the station when two uniformed officers came up behind them. “Buffy Summers,” they not-asked.

“What now?” Joyce demanded, exhausted and exasperated.

“We have a warrant,” the taller officer explained, “to take this juvenile into custody.”

“What?” Buffy sputtered. “They just said they couldn’t—”

“On what grounds?” Joyce demanded loudly, silencing her daughter with a gesture. The shorter officer, a bald, fat man whose thick neck and double chin made his head look just a little like the head of a penis, began to read out a long list of charges that included everything from forgery and theft by deception to attempted prescription drug fraud, but nothing whatsoever about murder. Other than a charge of public drunkenness and one of indecent exposure, it was all about the prescription pad. “But they just said I could take her home!” Joyce protested.

“Not at this time,” said the dick-headed officer. “We have to be take her to the JDC in Fondren to get processed. Of course we have our hands pretty full, working on quite a backlog, but we should be able to get her done in... oh... about twenty-four hours.”

“Oh, no!” Buffy protested looking panicked. “I don’t _have_ twenty-four hours!” Three adults stared at her. “I mean...” she fumbled, “I have to go to school! I have to... do things.”

“The only thing you have to do” said the lengthier but much less penis shaped cop, “is come.”

**** 

London, UK, March, 29, 1925

The persistent tapping at Peter's front door didn't go away, no matter how much he ignored it. It just got more and more insistent. The women and the servants were out, of course, except for cook, who was busy in the kitchen and not responsible for the door.

Tiredly, he glanced up at the Cookoo clock on the wall of his study, before he remembered he had disabled it (or perhaps more accurately disemboweled it) the last time it had cheerfully suggested that he take note of the fact that it was two in the morning. Once he was asleep, Peter Travers could sleep through anything. But when he was uselessly flailing his way through a night of 'vital and urgent research' waiting for dawn, he hated to be disturbed. 

Cursing, he shrugged into his sport coat and went downstairs. He more than half expected to see the vicar coming to have another 'man to man' talk with him about missing services and how important it was to be an example for one's family and not to try to shoulder ones spiritual burdens alone. He'd give him that knowing, understanding, big brotherly look again. Idiot. He didn't know. He couldn't understand. They were not brothers.

But no, the service must still be going on. He suddenly remembered they were having guests for lunch, Myrna’s Aunt Clara and her Uncle Archibald, who sat on the Inner Council along with Peter's father. And Helena's.

Helena! It was not strange that he should think of her, for he had thought of nothing else, one way and another, for days on end. Thirty-seven dark days punctuating one impossibly restless night that never ended. But it was strange indeed that she should be standing at his front door. It was as if he had turned a corner in Baghdad or Istanbul and found her there. She was a vision in her drab 'modern' woman's calf length suit, her sensible bun and businesslike expression. An apparition of something long lost to him. Peter could have wept for joy or for sorrow. 

He opened his mouth to ask her how she'd been! God the _irony_ , never mind the stupidity! How'd he think she'd been? And yet she looked perfectly well. Calm. Pleasant. Serious. A long, unspeakably painful moment passed. “Won't you come in?” Peter said at last, hardly knowing how else to greet her.

“Good grief, Peter,” She said, with an unnerving little smile, “if I didn’t know any better I’d think I was the one who’d attacked you, the way you’re acting.” There was something in her voice, a sort of casual contempt. She might have been discussing the weather with someone she didn’t much care for. 

“I'm sorry if I off—if I—I mean—I didn't mean—not not I'm not—” Peter stammered, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. She laughed at that, a laugh that sounded very unlike Helena. Peter hardly knew if it was his heart that lurched or his stomach. He felt... afraid? “Did you... want something?” he asked. 

“It’s been over a month since you raped me,” she reminded him matter-of-factly, as if he could have forgotten. “I thought you’d want to know the results.” It was definitely his heart this time. He waited for her to say the words, praying without real hope that he'd misunderstood her obvious implication. But he hardly knew what to make of the answer to his prayer. “I’m not pregnant,” she said and laughed that strange, brutal laugh again. “To everything there is a season, Peter,” she reminded him, still sounding at once hostile and amused yet within hailing distance of total indifference. “I could have told you the timing was not the best.”

“Thank God!” he gasped, overcome with relief. 

She laughed again, sharper, crueler than before. “Do you think it’s as easy as that?” she asked. The HARDNESS in her eyes and in her voice chilled him. 

“I don't understand,” he said. 

“You promised to give me what I was asking for,” she reminded him. “You failed in that, but the time is now more to my purpose and I will have what you have promised me.”

“God have mercy!” Peter gasped, falling to his knees, looking up at her in pitiable horror. 

“It’s not God you need to beg for mercy, Peter!” she scolded him harshly, pulling him to his feet and holding onto him by the collar, “It’s not God you have wronged. Your soul’s debts are owed to me and you will pay them on my terms.” 

“Gods and Demons,Helena!” Peter demanded, “Are you mad? You'll be ruined. Don't you realize that!” 

She gave him that horrible laugh again, shaking her head. “You don’t understand,” she said, “but you don’t have to.” Her voice was hard and casual again. “Come on,” she added, nodding toward the stairs, “we haven’t got all day.”

Peter knew he should refuse her, but unaccountably, he could not. Was it that he felt she was entitled to what she asked? No! How can a madman be entitle to his madness? But he knew he deserved to have to comply though it did only harm and no good to anyone. He had earned the disgrace she now demanded of him. 

“You'll have to explain it all to me again,” he told her apologetically, "what you were saying...” he couldn't look at her, “... the other day. About modern methods of Agriculture.” God, how was he ever supposed to manage to have an erection, let alone an orgasm under these circumstances? 

Helena brought forth yet more brutal laughter. “Do you really think it could be that easy to redeem yourself?” she hissed, sounding positively diabolical. “No, Peter, you will sin and be damned and go on sinning until I tell you you have paid the debt you owe me!” 

Suddenly, horribly, Peter realized what she meant for him to do. Not what she had asked, but what he had accuse her, so unjustly, of asking. He shook his head. “You don't want that!” he told her earnestly. 

Without warning, Helena's hand was on Peter's cock. She grabbed him through his trousers and squeezed him painfully hard. “Don’t tell me what I want, old friend,” She said quite calmly, then laughed a merry, haughty _Helena_ laugh, which startled and confused him. It was as if he were being tormented not merely by this present, bitter, adult woman but also by the child that she had once been, by her whole self, with out regard to time. He tripped through the tall grass of Aunt Katernine's country place, beyond the barn and the mill pond, through the endless jumbled summers of an eternal, ephemeral, momentary childhood his beloved playmate at his heals, lightly bounding after him, to devour him, a wolf, with innocent laughter on her lips.

“Upstairs,” she ordered. Her voice was hard and flat. He followed her up. She lay down on his bed, Myrna's bed, fully clothed, waiting. Peter stared down at her, no notion of what he should do next. “Your wife will be home in an hour,” she reminded him impatiently. 

He could see she wasn’t intending to make love with him in any active sense. She expected him to do in cold blood what he had done in the heat of passion, to violate her while she lay there neither inviting nor resisting him. “I don't think I can do this,” he half pleaded, half apologized. “Physically, I mean. The... act itself. I don't think I can … become aroused.” 

“I have confidence in you, Peter,” she said with hard, flat heavy irony. “If it helps, imagine that I'm begging you to stop.” Peter felt a stab of guilt and, paradoxically a flash of anger, of resentment. She was stabbing him with his guilt deliberately, after all. 

He could hear the clock in the upstairs hall ticking. He wanted her gone before Myrna and the girls came home for certain. And Uncle Archibald. Just imagine! Clearly, he had to do whatever he was going to do quickly. Turning her away unsatisfied wouldn't be a swift process.

Without looking at her, Peter stripped himself from the waist down and walked over to the bed. Helena ran a cool, appraising eye over his exposed genitals, then made clear with a contemptuous snort that she was unimpressed. This scrutiny wilted what little progress Peter had made towards an erection. But it also made him angrier with her, and anger is a feeling that tends to push guilt and shame out of its way. 

Peter pushed up Helena's skirt and found that she wore nothing under it. He smiled grimly at the physical pun involved and lay down on top of her body. He rubbed his unimpressive penis against her much more inspiring vulva, trying to ignore the fact that her body was as ridged as a two day old corpse. His heart quickened as his body began to respond to hers at last, despite his anguish and regret. 

Unbuttoning her jacket and blouse, Peter slid his hands under her camisole and squeezed her breasts. He closed his eyes to keep from seeing the tears in hers, the hard set of her mouth, her hands twisted in the sheets, knuckles turning white. He thumbed her nipples and they responded to him, just as if to the touch of a welcome lover. “If you let me kiss them,” he whispered, “I think it might speed matter up considerably.”

“Do whatever you like,” Helena said, somewhere between indifference and contempt. Hating himself, knowing better, Peter took her invitation at face value. He lifted her camisole and buried his face in her chest, rubbing and nuzzling her, lapping like a puppy at a bowl of milk. His cock was more than half hard now. His blood began to boil with the anticipation of thrusting it once again inside her. But the memory of her cries of pain disturbed him, restrained him. He needed reassurance that, no matter how sordid the circumstances that had lead to the sexual act, this time she was his accomplice rather than his victim. 

Peter slid his hand between the outer fold of Helena's sexual parts, finding only the very slightest hint of lubrication. Exploring a little deeper, to the surface of her inner lips, he found much the same. Worse still, her already ridged body, impossibly, stiffened further at his touch, threatening him with the opposite reaction. 

Peter persevered. Only slightly embarrassed at the indignity of the act, given what he has already done, Peter inserted the first two fingers of his left hand, the hand that had not yet touched her, into his own mouth and pulled them out, slick with saliva, which he rubbed into Helena's intimate parts until she softened just a little, physically at least. He glanced hopefully, helplessly in the general direction of her face, praying to see a look of mild anticipation or at least of calm acceptance. 

This time, his prayers were not answered. Fat tears rolled down Helena's cheeks. Her eyes were shining with rage. “Damn it, Peter,” she said, “get on with it!” If he was going to, he had better. As it was, he had to spread her open with his fingers in order to penetrate her. Still, once he was inside, the act itself aroused him and he was better able to continue. Despite her less than receptive emotional state, Helena was a little bit more prepared, physically, for his carnal attentions. The balance of fluidity and friction was more as it should have been, not that it could easily have been much worse than the first time. 

Peter tried not to think about that. Tried not to think at all, to locate his consciousness entirely in is body rather than his mind, to live presently in the physical sensations of that moment. It was hard for him. He was not usually a-present-in-the-physical-moment sort of person, although in the act of raping Helena, he certainly had been. But now the life of the mind had returned to him with a vengeance. It was as though he were being punished, plagued by inescapable, eternal contempativity for the abominable acts he had committed in that one moment of blissful thoughtlessness. 

But wherever his mind wandered, his cock was still thrust deep inside Helena, sliding to and fro with the short, swift, clumsy, uneven strokes of an man whose concentration is elsewhere. At last, it stiffened a little more fully and then released. With something between a groan and a sigh, Peter rolled off of her. Helena stood and began arranging her clothes back into place. This time her hair hadn't even come undone. 

**** 

Sheila hung back a moment at the station’s entrance, not wanting to insert herself into the situation of the Summers girl’s arrest, not willing to endure another moment of conversation with that Harpy mother of hers. Buffy was shamelessly jerking the officers around, blocking their efforts to penetrate to the truth, yet Joyce insisted on shielding her. It was more than the surviving Dr. Rosenberg could handle.  Her own daughter’s insistence on backing up the girl’s ridiculous version of events was tearing her up inside. What could you say to a child whose misplaced loyalties were so strong that she would stand by the degenerate who’d been caught sexually pleasuring her father’s killer in celebration of his murderer? Sheila could say nothing to her daughter, could hardly stand to look at her. She had sent her lawyer on a head to Fondren to deal with Willow’s business while she handled her own. 

As Joyce brought her tirade to a screaming finish, Sheila hurried unnoticed to her silver LexusShe refused to cry. Moisture wasn’t going to do her any good right now. Of course, she would have told anyone else in her position that crying was healthy, cathartic. But Sheila did not have time to hurt or heal. She had to remain firm, to try to keep a hold on what was left of her family, to force her daughter, however unwillingly to face reality. She had things to do.

After stops at the synagogue and the school, Sheila drove home and pulled into the garage. She sat there for a long while not moving, not wanting to go the rest of the way inside, dreading the violation she was about to commit. There was no avoiding it. She mounted the stairs and entered Willow’s room. At first she assumed that the books and papers spilled across daughter’s bedspread were the evidence of an interrupted bout of homework. But as she looked more closely she found that all of this material was actually her husband’s. Sheila examined the mess carefully. Each of the articles her daughter had been reading had the same, very specific, topic: the prevention of pregnancy after the fact of sexual intercourse. 

So Buffy had had a brush with truth in claiming sole responsibility for theft. She had spread her legs for her homicidal paramour when abuse of that poor woman’s corpse had been insufficient to sate the perverted lust he felt upon taking a human life.  She had done it again twenty-four hours later, becoming a receptacle for the semen he had produced in his ecstatic enjoyment of taking Ira from her.  It changed nothing, Sheila decided. Both girls had robbed her husband regardless of who was to benefit. Willow was as much a principal in the crime as if she had invited Ira’s killer to come inside her own body.

God! Why had her husband ever insisted on bringing another person into this evil world, into their lives, their home, their marriage? Why had she let him? He had been enough for her, the only person she’d ever needed or wanted to care about. But he had been so full of love. He needed more than one outlet. Her emptiness aching inside her, Sheila carried Ira’s things back to his study, put them away and locked the door. Mechanically, she walked downstairs, sat at the kitchen table and steeled herself to await her daughter’s return.  She had nine more months until Willow became an adult responsible for her own welfare.  Nine months was not such a long time.  As she had done once before, for Ira's sake, she would ride it out.

****

By mid-morning, Giles had run out of things to do in his office. He was sitting at a table, books spread before him, trying to distract himself by cross referencing Judeo-Christian descriptions of demons with their Classical Egyptian and Greco-Roman counterparts. Feeling himself the object of quiet, intense oculation, he looked up. Oz’s eyes silently penetrated him with a resolve that would not be denied.“Erm... how are you... this morning?” Giles fumbled awkwardly.

“How am, I?” said Oz in a tone that his most intimate friends might have recognized as indignant. “I just got through teaching a class? In computer science? Which is cool because apparently it gets me out of doing my math class for some reason? The only thing is, I got asked to do it because my girlfriend wasn’t here to get asked, I guess? Because she’s... in jail? Okay, so here’s the thing. She’s in jail, apparently, for stealing something which I know for a fact she does not need, and which, from what I’ve been told, I kind of didn’t think Buffy needed either. But, see, I don’t know for a fact about Buffy, and if anybody does, it’d just about have to be you.”

This was followed by what Giles studiously avoided thinking of as a pregnant pause. “What do you want me to say?” he finally managed.  Oz’s glare intensified, forcing Giles to look down at his lap, which seemed to stare guiltily back at him.

“You know,” said Oz contemplatively, just a bit contemptuously, “Willow really looks up to you. She practically worships you. In fact,” he added with a small, bitter exhalation in the direction of a laugh, “You could probably get her on her knees pretty easy if that’s what you’re into these days. She thinks you’re some kind of hero, some great intellectual warrior in the battle between Good and Evil. And, I don’t know, maybe you are.

"But what I see? From where I’m sitting? Men with guns put my girlfriend in chains so you could get away with getting your knob polished by a girl who’d have to stand on a milk crate to reach half your age. So it looks to me like you’re using Willow—and Buffy for that matter—to fight your own personal battles, and putting them in harm’s way to do it. I have a real problem with that. See in my book, that’s not something a hero would do.”

“You're right,” Giles admitted, burying his face in his hands. “This entire... situation is... I should never have let this happen.”

Oz’s features betrayed a tiny hint of grim amusement. “You Brits aren’t called the kings of understatement for nothing,” he observed.

“You aren’t going to try and...erm... ‘pound’ me are you?” Giles asked.

“Probably not,” Oz mused. “I’m thinking I might eventually bite you, though, depending on how things go.”

Giles made an unpleasant face as he contemplated this, then shrugged philosophically. “Fair enough, I suppose,” he admitted.

“Fair enough,” Oz repeated. With a slight nod, he backed towards the library door and withdrew.


	2. Dark Roots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snyder tried to enlist Giles in his war against Buffy. Every family has a history. Especially in Sunnydale.

Willow sat frozen to a cold metal bench in a drafty holding cell. The chill was beneath her notice. A fist of ice was thrust deep into her heart. Her father was dead. Gone forever. She needed him so desperately. Needed him to wrap her in his arms and tell her everything would be okay. He couldn’t. It wouldn’t. She was empty except for her regrets.  Willow had never gotten a whole lot of love from her mother. Ira easily, effortlessly filled a space inside Willow that Sheila could never touch. 

It wasn’t as if Sheila meant to neglect Willow's needs; she just never got around to meeting them. Her child was a mere distraction from her passionate love affair with her work, her ecstatic exploration of the hidden secrets of what went on within the pulsing pink folds of that most sensitive and mysterious of all organs, the human brain, and its phantasmagoric offspring, the mind.  

Until two nights ago. Now when Willow looked into her mother’s eyes,their usual haziness was replaced with a bitter clarity once reserved for academic and ideological enemies. Now Willow was the enemy. She would have given almost anything to be a vaguely pleasant distraction again.  _Almost_ anything, but not what Sheila wanted from her. Willow knew the price of her mother’s tepid embrace. Sheila wanted to see her finger Buffy for Ira’s murder.

Suddenly, the ponderous sound of the heavy metal door opening brought Willow back to herself. Flesh enclosed her once more. Her ass stung from the cold hardness of the metal bench felt through the thin material of her yellow jumpsuit. Sheila had forgotten to bring her any panties.

Flanked by two men who could not have taken her anywhere but under her own power, Buffy entered. She let them lock her in. “Oh, Wil!” she cried, folding Willow into her embrace, “I’m so sorry!” Willow clung to Buffy’s body, sobbing against her breast. She wanted to say that all was forgiven, that in most respects, there was nothing to forgive, but she was too overcome. They held each other close. Buffy rocked Willow like a child, running motherly, affectionate fingers through her hair as both girls continued to weep. “I promise...” Buffy began fiercely, when the sobbing had subsided a little. “Willow, I will not rest until—”

“I know,” Willow interrupted, not daring to let her finish, knowing it wasn’t a safe in here. “Buffy, I know.” Buffy followed her eyes to the camera and nodded, getting the message. A Juvenile detention cell was no place to proclaim a vow of blood vengeance. In all probability the walls had ears as well as eyes.

Buffy squeezed Willow’s shoulder, “I love you,” she said. That’s the big thing.”

“I know,” Willow repeated, hugging Buffy tighter than ever. “Believe me, I know.”

Buffy had the weird feeling that this hug was lasting a little too long, but under the circumstances she felt weird for feeling that way so she ignored it. “So...” Buffy asked, after a few more moments using the need to look Willow in the eyes while they spoke as an excuse to back up an inch or two, “how’s your mom holding up?”

Buffy felt Willow stiffen in her embrace. “Like Atlas,” she said bitterly. “She somersaulted right over denial and dove head first into martyred, self-righteous anger. She blames you. She blames me for not blaming you. Her idea of bargaining is to command me to burn you as a sacrifice to the gods of the criminal justice system.”

“God that sucks!” Buffy gasped, “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Willow said, drying her eyes. “I always thought, deep down inside, maybe her ‘love’ really didn’t reach deep down inside. Knowing for sure just makes everything easier. I’m my own woman now. I may have to live with her for now, but I don’t have to worry any more about pleasing her. I can’t satisfy her. Because she doesn’t love me.”

Buffy looked down at her own hands in her lap, not knowing how to respond to this dark revelation. “Well,” she said at length, “you can always stay over at my house, anytime you don’t feel welcome at home.”

Willow sat up a little straighter and looked miserably into her eyes. “I...don’t think I’m going to be welcome at your house either,” she explained. “The lawyer told me our moms already talked and decided they don’t want us to see each other anymore.”

Buffy was stunned, not that Sheila would forbid Willow to see her, but that her own mom would agree. Didn’t she understand what Willow meant to Buffy? “Well,” she said, trying to keep matters in perspective, “at least they can’t keep us from seeing each other at school.”

“Yeah,” said Willow, “actually, they can. Mom’s withdrawing me from Sunnydale. She’s calling in favors to get me into Kent Prep even though they don’t usually take, you know, _thieves_.”

“Wow,” said Buffy, ignoring Willow’s verbal self-abuse, “she means business.”

“Yeah,” said Willow, “she does. But it doesn’t matter. She can’t keep us apart. I mean, what’s she going to do, lock me in my room at night?” Both girls, thought about this for a moment. “You know,” Willow said, “actually she might.”

****

“ _There_ you are!” said an all too familiar voice in tones of triumphant accusation.

Giles looked up into the face of his inferior superior, Principal Snyder. “Yes,” he agreed, sweeping a vast expanse of library with his eyes, his tone so friendly and professional that no one could have ever proved in a court of law that he was being sarcastic, “once in a great while I do like to slip into some secret little... nook like this.”

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?”Snyder demanded, angered as usual, by his own incomprehension of events.

“I... thought it best,” Giles said levelly, “under the circumstances.”

“Yes,” Snyder said nastily, “the circumstances.”Giles gazed back at him impassively.“Mr. Giles, I work very hard to maintain order in this school. Discipline. I expect every member of this faculty to set an example, to show these kids what being disciplined means.”

“Well, then,” Giles retorted unable to hide his scorn any longer, “in future I shall try _not_ to find raped and murdered women in my bed. What else can I do for you this morning?”

“Buffy Summers,” said Snyder viciously. “I want her out of my school. I want her out of my town.”

“Humph,” Giles sniffed, “what makes you think I’m the man to help you get at her?”

“Everyone knows,” Snyder informed him, “there was no ‘kidnapping.’ That jailbait gun moll and her... paramour killed one of my teachers. I’m not going to take that lying down.”

“I assure you,” Giles began with suppressed heat, “Buffy Summers would never—”

“She’s a _teenager_ ,”Snyder scoffed. “You can’t tell me you know what she’s capable of.”

Indeed he could not.  “You’re point being?” Giles asked curtly.

“My point,” Snyder informed him, “is that that junior miscreant should be expelled from this school and into the gutter where she can freely spawn with her own kind. Unfortunately, those cowards on the school board insist on _proof_.”

“Again, I ask,” said Giles, holding tight to his temper, ready to blow his top at the next insinuation, “why are you telling _me_ this?”

“Search your memory,” Snyder urged him his voice slow, snaky disturbingly sensuous almost sexual. “I think you’ll find that you _do_ remember seeing who took your car. I think you’ll find that our Miss Summers was only too ready to be taken for a ride.”

This was too provocative to be endured. Slowly, Rupert rose to his full height seeming to swell with quiet, dignified rage. “Let me tell you, Mr. Snyder,” he said closing the space between them, standing chest to eye with his puny adversary, “what I think you will find if you search _your_ memory. You will find that again and again Buffy Summers has acted where others have merely talked about ‘discipline’ and has stood firm against ‘disorder’ when bombasts and blowhards have wilted and withdrawn. Each and every person in this school and in this town owes that young woman more favors than we can ever hope to be in any position to repay! And I refuse to have any part of your mad crusade against her!”

Snyder stared up at the usually mild mannered librarian wide-eyed, mouth gaping, unable to speak. He’d never seen this side of him. And the man wasn’t finished. He had more to share and Snyder took it all, too stunned to do anything else. “Furthermore, If one word of this little fantasy you have concocted about Ms. Summers’... criminal involvements dribbles from your lips into anyone’s ears, I will be forced to give a detailed account of our conversation to the those who are in a position to make your life extremely uncomfortable, and I _don’t_ mean the Del Bacco County School Board. I imagine your solicitation of false evidence concerning a murder that took place in _your_ school should arouse the interest of both state and federal prosecutors, as well as getting you some very personal attention from the California State Board of Education!”

“This isn’t over,” Snyder sputtered when he had swallowed and could speak again. He began coughing, as if he were literally choking on the librarian’s words. He was burning with more than anger Snyder realized. He was ablaze with fever.  He was getting the damned flu! That made him angrier. He ought to be excused from things like illness. He had too much he had to do, too many subordinates who needed to be disciplined. Mr. Giles stared at him in steely, resolute silence, still boiling but also smug, triumphant in attitude if not in fact. Somehow Snyder knew it was his fault that he was getting sick. Grunting with inarticulate rage, the smaller man turned on his heels and stormed off down the hallway to his office.

He sat down at his desk, still bristling from his encounter with the cocky Englishman. How dare that puffed up prima donna suggest that he needed a teenaged outsider like Buffy Summers to help him do his job! Imagine, _her_ giving _him_ a hand with something too hard for him to handle himself, helping him beat off some _thing_ that he couldn’t lick on his own! Something he couldn’t get the School Board or the City Council or the police or his cousin the Sheriff or even the Mayor himself to lick for him! He needed Buffy Summers to lick it!

The very idea was appalling! Really, it confirmed what he’s suspected all along. Whatever that underage vigilante had taken into her constricted headspace to do, Rupert Giles was in it up to his neck. Her violent forays into the town’s lower regions, her insertion of herself into matters of security and otherwise poking around in the schools business; all of it was clearly at his solicitation. The Englishman had come into Sunnydale not one month before the great St. Buffy. Clearly, like John the Baptist, he had come to prepare the way.

Briefly, Snyder wondered which group of well-meaning interlopers they took their orders from. Gypsies, covens, cults, the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, secret societies of every sordid description all had their handmaidens at Sunnydale High thanks to that idiot Fluty, who’d hired almost a whole faculty before he’d gotten so wrapped up in servicing his students needs that he had let four of them eat him in his own office while he screamed and writhed and clawed for something to hold on to.

Each of these factions sent their minions like so many hands and fingers groping blindly along the rim of hell’s orifice, each with a slightly different but related notion of ‘fighting evil.’ But those who knew and loved Sunnydale, who understood Her, who had been born from Her womb and suckled at Her breast as Snyder had, knew that the evil here could not be fought, could not be defeated. It had to be... accommodated... balanced... appeased... controlled.

Snyder understood. Though he had lived much of his adult life outside of Sunnydale, traveling as far as Los Angeles in pursuit of his professional goals, She was never far from his mind. He thrilled with delight every time he came into Her city limits. She was his town, his home. He had never wavered in his commitment to protect Her from the forces of chaos that constantly threatened to violate Her delicate balance and tear Her apart.

It was clear that in the years he’d been away, balls had been allowed to drop. The powerful men of the town, those who made up the School Board, the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, had been more interested in getting their own needs serviced than in giving Sunnydale what She needed. They had let some of the biggest things imaginable slide in his town, including the all-important leadership position at Sunnydale High.

The school was the key to keeping order in the town. It placed the towns youth, natural agents of chaos, where they could be used as a sort of barrier to contain the emissions of chaotic energy that the Hellmouth periodically spurted forth. At last Snyder was in a position to make sure that barrier was being used effectively and no one was going to get anything past it on his watch, least of all Rupert Giles.

****

As the hot flush of anger receded Giles felt relief swelling deep within him. If the School Board were refusing turn Buffy out for lack of proof of sufficient misconduct, it hardly seemed likely she was about to be saddled with a murder charge. Sunnydale was such a nasty, incestuous little town, it was impossible to believe that the movers and shakers would stay out of such a juicy business. They’d be moving and shaking all over it. Whatever there was to be known, they knew.

Snyder had also made no mention of wanting to discipline Willow, so it was a fair bet she too had been cleared of murder charges at the very least. And if Snyder were trying to entice him to betray Buffy, if he thought that he had even the remotest chance with him in that regard, then the investigation had not penetrated his secret in the slightest. In other words, Rupert needled himself, he was relieved to remain employed because his thick head teacher had no idea that he had fucked an eleventh grade girl.

Giles slid his fingers into his pocket yet again, fondling Pummil’s packet once more. He had until just about midnight to give Buffy what she needed. Despite the unpleasantness of the conversation he’d had to have to get his hands on the stuff, he wasn’t sorry he’d done it. But he preferred to avoid contact with the intimates of his fallen Slayers. Giles shuttered with the memory of discovering Amanda’s still warm, dripping body, curled around the shaft that impaled her, the act of her own hand imploring David to lay her in the same soft bed of earth that embraced his wife.

‘Get a hold of yourself man!’ Giles silently chastised himself. He had to stop immersing himself in all of his many sins and regrets. It was bound to be bad for his health to continually flog and punish himself this way. Once Buffy swallowed what he had for her to swallow, they could put this whole unseemly business behind them. If only he could overcome his daft, self-severing notion that enjoying hot illicit sex with a beautiful girl and wanting to fuck her again were unmistakable symptoms of true love.

****

“It’s over, R.C.” Sheriff Ron Wilkins said. “We’re holding back on processing her and the Rosenberg girl, dragging it out as long as we can, but we can’t stop them from being released much longer.”

“I’m telling you,” Snyder insisted combatively, clenching the receiver in his fist, “that mini-skirted felon is directly responsible for these murders. I can feel it in my bowels.”

“And I’m telling _you_ ,” his cousin countered, “I’m not interested in what you feel in your bowels and neither is the Prosecutor. He’s a Fondren man. They don’t know the score over here. They need... proof, something they can lay their hands on.”

“So find some ‘proof’” Snyder insisted, “Make some!”

“What do you want me to make it with?” Ron challenged. “Every single witness who was at that theater says the victim was snatched through the ceiling while both girls were standing ten feet away.”

“What about a bail hearing?” Snyder asked hopefully. “I don’t think Joyce Summers could come up with much more than a couple of thousand dollars, short of selling her business, and I get the feeling Sheila Rosenberg would pay _not_ to have her daughter home.”

“It’d never work,” the Sheriff, insisted, exasperated. “They’re both juveniles. Neither of them has much of a prior record, that stuck anyway, and the worst charge they’re facing is a C Felony. Judge Fondren will ROR no questions asked.”

“But,” Snyder objected, “Summers is an outsider. She has no roots in the community.”

“Maybe,” Cousin Ron reminded him, “But the Rosenberg girl has roots that’d make a vampire cringe. Maybe you’d be better off trying to get on the good side of her, and her friend.”

“Humph,” Snyder scoffed. “Her ‘roots’ don’t scare me! The Mayor himself doesn’t have a root planted deeper in this town than mine!”

Ron knew this was true. Richard C. Snyder was a real son of Sunnydale. His mother was a Wilkins, granddaughter of the Founder and first cousin of the Mayor. Her mother had been a Gleaves, _and_ the granddaughter of Josephus Du Lac, one of few known descendants through his _legal_ , _Christian_ wife.

Some of his father's roots went even deeper into the history, even the prehistory, of Del Bacco County. His Snyder great-grandparents had come into Sunnydale 1903, at the personal solicitation of the Founder, though during the town’s early upheavals they had publicly shown themselves to be intimately connected with the Gleaves faction. Their son, Samuel Snyder, R.C.’s grandfather, had shocked the whole community by taking as his wife Alesandra Delacruz, daughter of the only powerful Mexican landowner still holding out in the county.

Among the earliest white settlers in California, by Alasandra’s time the Delacruz family were so bastardized with native blood that only their wealth prevented them from being treated as Indians. It was even hinted that their lineage swelled with the blood of things far wilder than Mexicans or Indians.

Samuel was denounced as a pawn of unnatural lust, but the marriage made a much colder kind of sense. For Alasandra it was politically savvy, for Samuel, financially so. She had prevented her family holdings from being bought out, burned out or pillaged by baseless litigation, favored means of breaking Rancheros in that part of the state. He had brought his modest family wealth beyond their wildest dreams, famously telling his mother that he’d have fucked the devil himself to be the lord of that rich valley Alasandra had opened up to him.

The principal himself had been brought up in a modest, dignified fashion by his widowed mother after his father had bankrupted the family and drank himself to death. Actually, she’d lived off her Wilkins relatives as shamelessly as a whore, which she seemed to figure was about right since the Mayor had ended up taking possession of Alasandra’s valley.  Snyder had matriculated from Del Bacco State Teacher’s College two years before it became U.C. Sunnydale and had burned ever since with a desire to have dominion over Sunnydale High. Now that that prize was his, he was digging in with gusto and holding tight.

“They’re not getting away with this!” he railed. “I want discipline!I want obedience! I’m going to hammer down the nails that stick up, starting with that sword wielding slut-bunny Buffy Summers!”

****

“My Lord?” came a timid voice, breathless with reverence, with love, with desire to be looked upon, noticed. Angel raised his countenance, eyes boring into his unworthy creature. The novice vampire quailed.

“What?” Angel demanded testily, offended by its existence.

“Th-th-th Sl-sl-layer,” it stammered, cowering now behind it’s demonic features. “Sh-sh-she’s b-being re-released in the m-morn-ning. I w-w-was t-told t-to t-te-tell you—”

“So you’ve told me,” he said dismissively, “Now, ge-ge-get out of my sight before I bite your sniveling tongue out and shove it up your ass.” The minion fled in a panicky scramble. Angel watched impassively. Usually he relished witnessing the fear he caused,especially in other vampires. It aroused and excited him. Usually.  Today he had other oxen to gore.

After ninety years above ground, he was used to a few creature comforts. The factory had hardly risen to his standard, but squatting in a sewer? Eating, sleeping and fucking in the damp stench of piss and shit sucked, and not in the good way. It made him want to rape Spike all over again, not out of lust, but out of spite, maybe with his fist or a crowbar, just for having a point.

Worse still was the whispering: Angel had been beaten; Angel was laying low, hiding from the Slayer, afraid to leave the tunnels. A vampire family was a harem of fickle whores. Something had to be done to restore dignity to his presence before his underlings decided they’d rather be surmounted by someone else. Like Spike or Drusilla. Angel needed what every sultan needs, a palace. He also needed to have a confrontation, to be _seen_ having a confrontation, with the Slayer. And he was counting on Dr. Ira Rosenberg, OB/GYN to help him find an opening.


	3. Biology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a flu epidemic grips Sunnydale, Buffy and Willow are finally released from Juvenile Detention. But will it be soon enough for Buffy to benefit from the emergency contraceptive pills that Giles has finally obtained for her. If Xander doesn't want anybody else besides Cordelia, why does he keep thinking about Willow?

When Tuesday came, Willow was not the only absent student. Xander tried to endure the day by imagining that she too was home in bed with the flu, that she would be back. But he knew better. Cordelia would be back tomorrow or the next day, joking about how even the nastiest virus could be a weight-loss blessing in disguise. Buffy would be back, chafing against her legal restraints and plotting her next throw-down with Angel. Amy would be back. Doug would be back. Larry would be back, grinning and giving him the thumbs up, calling him buddy and trying to fix him up with that guy on the swim team, thinking a little sodomy by proxy was the perfect gift to make up for repeatedly beating the shit out of him over a five year period. But Willow wasn’t coming back to Sunnydale High. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Not ever.

Skipping his second period English class for the second time in the young week, Xander went to the boy’s room to jerk off. Not that he was in any sense in a ‘good’ mood, but his suddenly non-imaginary sex life had gotten so hot and heavy over the weekend only to be cut off so abruptly that he felt like a junkie going cold turkey. He needed a little detox to ease the pain of withdrawal. He locked the stall and sat down pants around his ankles fully intending to release some tension, pleased with the novelty of vividly _remembering_ sex rather than just imagining it. But no matter how many arousing images of Cordelia swam through his mind—her firm, smooth ass, her soft wet cunt, her happy breasts perking up to greet his tongue—his thoughts kept drifting back to Willow.

He kept rubbing himself, trying to push her from his mind, but he couldn’t stop worrying about her, all alone with no one but Sheila to turn to for affection or understanding. Which would be like trying to pour yourself a cup of milk out of one of those Kraft Singles. What Willow really needed was a guy friend, someone strong and capable to protect her and give her a shoulder to cry on. But Sheila wouldn’t even call him back. Suddenly, everything and everyone that had anything to do with Sunnydale High or Buffy Summers was verboten, never mind the fact that Xander and Willow had been best friends for more than a decade before Buffy came along. Never mind the fact that he _needed_ Willow and now, more than ever, she needed him.

They needed to hold each other, comfort each other. Suddenly, his mind flashed on a recent memory that had nothing to do with Cordelia. Willow, in his bed, in his pajamas, lust and devotion shining in her eyes, the picture of innocence longing not to be. The aggressive, hungry way she’d licked and nuzzled and bit him and put her hands on his body while he called upon terror rather than lack of desire for the strength to push her away. Xander took his hand off his half engorged penis, sighing in frustration. Signals were getting crossed up. He couldn’t masturbate and think of Willow. He couldn’t masturbate and _not_ think of Willow. Because he couldn’t do anything and not think of Willow. _“Friendships change all the time,” she’d said, “People grow apart. They grow closer.”_

And that was exactly the kind of thinking that led to getting punched in the face. Or hacked up with an ax. Or never spoken to by Willow again. Even if she had been right. Even if there was some wonderful sexual potential between them that he long ago should have acted on in a perfect world. Even if making love to Willow a year ago or a month ago would have been the best decision of his life, it was too late. He had Cordelia; She had Oz. He might not be listed under brainiacs in “Who’s Who Among American High School Students” but he knew better than to risk making every single friend he had hate him forever only to end up without a girlfriend or anything else. He didn’t need his friendship with Willow to change or grow closer. He just needed her back.

Xander stood up, used his dick for its other relieving function, which didn’t make him feel a hell of a lot better, put it away and headed for the library, looking for company in his misery. He found it. Hunkered down at the front reading table, towel over his head and shoulders, steam wafting out around his shrouded head from some kind of earthenware contraption, Rupert Giles was the poster boy for misery. “Hey man,” Xander, teased halfheartedly, “you can’t smoke that stuff in hear.”

“How very...hurmph...very ... amusing,” Giles croaked between coughs.

“Seriously, though,” Xander said with real concern, “why don’t you go home and rest? That’s what everybody else is doing.”

“Everybody else,” Giles reminded him in a hoarse whisper, “isn’t waiting for Buffy.” This was followed by another round of coughing and a deep inhalation of steam. “I have a sacred duty...” more hacking ensued. “A sacred duty....” he tried again, getting no further. “I have to see her.” He finished finally.

“Do you really think she’ll, come to school today?”

The librarian picked up his currently disused glasses from the table and began to clean them. Xander recognized this as a declaration of inner turmoil. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “But I can’t very well call her house again.”

“Yeah,” Xander agreed, “I’ve left four messages since the last time I talked to Joyce. That was Sunday morning.”

Giles sighed, which set off another round of coughing, and another sigh at the absurdity of physical illness. “I’ve left five myself,” he admitted when he was able to speak again.

“Careful,” Xander warned, “Cordy’ll be accusing you of being in love with Buffy next.”

Giles was grateful that the strangling noise he emitted was masked by another fit of coughing. “Yes...” he murmured catching his breath, “erm quite. Um, Xander? Isn’t there an erm class of some sort that you ought to be attending?”

“Not in the strictest sense,” he said with a roguish smile, seeing no reason why he ‘ought’ to do anything. Giles let it go. Between the flu and the rest of his oppressive personal troubles, he couldn’t quite work himself up sticking his nose in Xander's business. They sat together in miserable silence. As one they pricked up at the subtle swishing sound of the swinging door. As one they caught their breath, hoping so see Buffy. As one they released it, disappointed.

“Biology was canceled,” Oz explained, “because of... biology. So, we’re waiting for Buffy?”

Xander nodded. “Welcome to the vigil.”

Unless Xander was imagining things, Oz skewered Giles with his eyes as if daring him to protest. Giles shifted uncomfortably but said, “Please, join us.”The silence shifted, less companionably miserable, more gloomily tense. Into this tense, gloomy silence Buffy came.

“Wow,” she said in a small voice, trying in vain to keep up a smile, “I’d ask who died...” Suddenly, she found herself wrapped in Xander’s fierce embrace. He held her until she was forced to subtly shift in his arms to signal her discomfort. He released her, embarrassingly embarrassed. 

Giles spoke to cover his own discomfort with his discomfort. “How is Willow?” he asked.

It was a natural question, but still a hard one. “She’s um... not fine?” Buffy tried to explain, “But she’s...strong...she’s making it. Things are bad though... with her mother. They don’t have that much direct contact at this point. They talk through their lawyer.”

Oz made a small noise of derision. “So what you’re basically saying is, she’s alone, she’s scared, she’s lost everything, including her parents, her school, and all her friends; but you think she’s _making it_?”

Buffy looked down at the hands in her lap. “She...uh...seemed to be...when I saw her this morning,” she mumbled, “In jail.”

“Look...” said Oz, “I know you all have your own things to handle, but somebody has to help Willow handle her stuff. And that person has to satisfy Sheila first. I can’t do that and be part of your little group thing. So, I’m out. Save the world, don’t save the world. I can’t let that be my problem.”

“Come on Oz...” Xander began, but he let his exhortation wilt and retract itself. Oz was stabbing Giles with his eyes. If it had been Buffy, Xander would have kind of understood, but what had Giles done to earn such a savage pronging?

“Don’t worry about the full moon thing,” Oz went on tying up all business with the Slayer and her crew. “I know how to restrain myself.” 

“Wow,” said Xander into the taunt atmosphere he left in his wake, “behold the wrath of Oz. Why is he blaming you guys so hard for all this?” Buffy shot Giles a furtive questioning look, to which he responded with a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Hey,” cried Xander, “I saw that. You guys know something that I don’t.”

“A great many things,” said Giles testily.

“Giles!” Buffy scolded.

“Hey, no,” said Xander getting to his feet, “I get it. Loud and clear. None of my business. It’s only my best friend’s life going to shit. Silly me, all this time, I thought it was my two best friends. Oh well, I guess that’s no surprise with my...uh...limited intellectual abilities. I, uh, guess I’ll catch you guys later, you know if you ever decide I need to know something.”

“Xander, wait!” Buffy called after him, rising to her feet, but he was out the door and gone. Suddenly fuming, she rounded on Giles demanding, “What the Hell was that?”

“I...I’m sorry, Buffy...” He managed scratchily. “I don’t know what came over me. When I feel...stressed and...ill... I get... impatient.” Giles breathed in more steam before surrendering to another bout of coughing without looking up, afraid she would read in his eyes that, foolishly, without any right, he’d been stung by her tolerance of Xander’s opportunistic ‘hug’. 

Buffy rolled her eyes and sighed, but she couldn’t keep up her verbal assault, however well deserved, against such a pathetic target. Instead she flopped down in the chair next to him and patted his hand. Giles squeezed her hand briefly in return, then let go as if he had been burned.

Buffy had felt it too, a white hot flash of sexual energy that left her nipples erect and her cunt tingling as if his hands has actually touched these parts of her body. The world seemed a little dim, a little sideways , it was almost like being drunk. Buffy shook herself, sobering quickly. Giles gave her a small, sad, companionably guilty smile. He felt inside the pocket of his tweed coat and handed her a tiny package.“A present?” she asked puzzled.

Giles shrugged, “better late than never... I suppose.”

Buffy unfolded the tiny white paper sack. It wasn’t a present. It was a double edged sword of necessity and uselessness. Something she needed yesterday. Six tiny pink pills and a note in doctory writing telling her to take three by Monday night and three more twelve hours later, right about now. Buffy stared at the pills, not sure exactly why she was feeling so weird about them. “What if I’m already pregnant?” she asked.

“What if you’re not?” Giles countered reasonably. “Hadn’t we better do what we can to keep it that way?” Buffy nodded, but she felt... angry? Why angry? Giles seemed to know why, even if she didn’t. “We haven’t really talked,” he said apologetically, “about this weekend, about... everything that happened. About... the way we left things.”

A memory thrust itself from Buffy’s preconscious into her active mind, exploding with hot, sharp Technicolor sensation and hazy purple mimeographed emotion: _The hot, wet kiss of lovers parting no knowing when they would meet again. Her heart thumping beneath her all but exposed breasts. Giles, another Giles and yet the same, pulling desperately away from her, as if she were a pool of quicksand, a confusing tangle of passion and rejection, fighting his engorged penis to fashion a crude garment around it of his towel, acting as if she couldn’t see him, having no time for modesty._

So now they were right back where they had been Saturday morning. All impossible possibilities unresolved. But still impossible.

“Look,” Buffy said, picking up three of the pills in one hand and his water glass in the other, trying to sound more okay than she really felt, “Don’t sweat it. It was a mistake. Let’s just... not make a big deal about it.” She downed the pills and the water in one gulp, folding the other three back into the tiny sack. Giles looked horrified. “Giles,” she asked shortly, “what?”

“Buffy!”Giles sputtered. He dissolved into a long fit of coughing, through which he never the less managed to scowl at the glass and gesture at his own throat.

“Oh, relax,” Buffy countered, fighting exasperation, “I never get sick.”

They sat in silence for a minute or two. Giles sucked in a lungful of steam and coughed again. Buffy looked up at the clock on the wall behind his head. Still fifteen minutes until third period. She felt strange, uncomfortable waiting here with Giles, but deliberately choosing to go somewhere else would have felt even stranger. 

The thing that had happened between them— _his hungry mouth, his hand on her breast, his big, beautiful cock plunging and lunging inside her vagina, warm semen spraying and pooling inside her_ —was just... a thing that had happened, Buffy told herself for the billionth time. She couldn’t let it change who she was around Giles. She just had to get over it. Surely if they both acted normal around each other, consistently, for a long enough period of time, eventually they would start to feel normal around each other again. Surely. Eventually. 

Of course, Buffy realized, the pills she had just taken, or more accurately the possibility they existed to prevent, meant that she could not even start to feel normal about her relationship (little r) with Giles until that possibility was resolved.

The bell rang. Giles was stooped over the table, hacking up a lung again. He could have been a hundred. With a deep sigh, Buffy tucked the remaining pills into her jacket pocket, got up and headed to class. This was biology they were talking about here, not magic, right? It stood to reason that the window for preventing pregnancy hadn’t slammed shut instantly on the stroke of midnight. She’d just have to take the second does tonight and hope for the best.

It stood to reason that two people could be suddenly, persistently attracted to each other and it not mean more than that. After all, this was biology they were talking about here, not magic, right?

 


	4. Tight Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When a bombshell coroner's report reveals the ugly truth about the death of Ira Rosenberg, the Scooby gang must put aside their differences, and maneuver around court orders and parental constraints to prevent disaster.

Oz knocked on Willow’s front door around lunch time. He had a large bouquet of bright yellow chrysanthemums which he held out to Sheila when she opened the front door. She was dressed in black and wearing a scarf on her head. She looked at the flowers warily. “I suppose, those are for Willow,” she commented. It hurt and angered Oz to hear the bitterness with which she spoke her daughter’s name, but he kept his expression politely neutral.

“No, actually,” he answered, “they’re for your husband.”

A bleak smile flickered across her face. “Please,” she said, taking the flowers, “come in.”

Willow wore black like her mother. Her eyes told Oz she was desperately grateful to see him, but she kept her face as blank as possible. “Daniel,” she said blandly, “thank you for coming.” Obviously ‘Oz’, was already too closely associated in Sheila’s mind with Buffy.

‘Daniel’ struggled for something appropriate to say. The Rabbi and a dozen mourners waited politely to hear it. “Well,” he said, truthfully at least, “Dr. Rosenberg delivered me.”

“He touched a lot of lives,” said Willow bleakly.

“Yes,” Sheila interjected pointedly, “your father was a good man. He deserves respect.”

“Do you want something to eat?” Willow asked, ignoring her mother. “There’s a ton of food in the kitchen.”

“I’d like that,” said Oz, trailing her into the other room.

As soon as they were alone, Willow’s impassive mask melted to reveal an expression of fatigue, grief and desperate need. Oz was nearly knocked over as she lunged into his arms. He wrapped them around her, sunned by her ferocity, filled with tender, violent, protective affection. “Oh, Oz” she cried, “thank God you’re here. I need you, oh God, I need you...”

“Shush,” he whispered, holding her close, stroking her hair, “I’m here, baby. Whatever you need.”

“I need you,” she sobbed, overcome with grief, “I need you to get a message to Buffy.”

Oz blinked, taken aback, but rallied quickly. He would have preferred if she’d asked for his understanding ear or his shoulder to cry on, but it was Willow’s time of distress. He could be whatever she needed, even a messenger. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll see her at school tomorrow.”

“No,” Willow mumbled miserably, “tomorrow may be too late. You’d better go back to school after lunch. Sorry.”

“Hey, no problem.” He assured her, “I’m a senior so the go and come back thing is pretty much legit. What do you need?”

“A Vampire Slayer,” said Willow grimly, “for my father.”

“Oh,” said Oz quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Willow buried her face in his chest and sobbed. “There was blood, on his lips. The coroner’s report said there was blood on his lips, but it wasn’t his. It wasn’t his blood type. I can’t let this happen to him, Oz, I can’t!”

“Shuuuush,” Oz whispered soothingly again, holding her tighter. “We won’t; I promise we won’t.”

“Oh, Oz!” she wailed. “Everything is just so awful, I feel like the world is ending!” she sniffed and wiped her eyes. “But then it doesn’t,” she added quietly. “It keeps getting worse than worst and we still just have to keep living in it.” Willow clung to Oz, sobbing and sobbing while he held her tighter than a lover, like a swaddled infant. “God! I miss him!” she breathed against Oz’s body as her tears subsided. “God, I miss him so much!” But when she lifted her face there was more than just anguish in her eyes, a hungrier, needier kind of distress. She wanted desperately for him to kiss her and to keep kissing her, in a way that could lead to more, to open herself up to him, unguarded, his for the taking. Because her heart had a vacancy.

Oz brushed the hair back from Willow’s face. He wanted to fill her vacancy, to fill all the voids in her life, to be the man she needed. But he wasn’t the man she needed. He was the man who was there. He loosened his hold on her, breathing out in gentle frustration. “I’d better go,” he said.

“Don’t,” Willow begged, holding on to him with both hands as he started to pull away, digging her nails into his back through his shirt. She pulled him to her by a combination of physical force and his lack of desire to resist and kissed his lips. He kissed her back, gently, tenderly, taking her face in his hands. She slid her hands down the curve of his back to his waist, to his hips, pulling him against her. The kiss deepened. At last he brought it to a stop.

“I _really_ better go,” he said. Because if she told him one more time not to stop, he wasn’t going to. He wanted to hold her; he wanted to have her. He wanted to be swallowed up and surrounded by her, to bury himself inside her, to thrust his hard dick inside her a dozen dozen times, to make love to her with hungry, lupine passion, to make her his own, to protect and claim and mark and devour her. He wanted to fuck her on the kitchen floor and rip out her throat with his teeth. But she needed one about as much as the other. He took her hands from his body and kissed them, releasing them back to her in a way that put physical distance between them without speaking of rejection. “I gotta go," he repeated.  "I have to find Buffy.”

****

“And your mother ordered you, specifically, to wait here, with me, from 2:30 until 5:30 to get picked up?” Giles asked worriedly. He seemed to be feeling a little better, flu-wise at least, but apparently no safer being alone with Buffy.

“Yeah,” said Buffy, as cavalierly as she could manage, as if she really thought the library were a totally safe place to spend three whole hours. “It’s like déjà vu all over again. She actually said, and I quote, ‘because I know Mr. Giles will be there and he’s the only one in that whole place I trust to keep an eye on you.’”

“Well,” he said chagrined, “that’s a bit...ironic isn’t it.”

“I thought so too,” Buffy agreed as if the irony were purely, amusingly theoretical. She was having to work a little too hard at pretending there was no chance of anything ever happening between them again, at trying to make that be true. For someone who wanted prospective sex off the table, he sure had a way of implicitly bringing it up. His eyes kept begging her to beg him to surrender. “But hey,”she rattled on cheerfully, “at least I don’t have to make excuses to come here for training, so that’s a good. I’m not sure how I’m going to keep up with my patrols though. I mean, I know I can sneak out, like always, but now if I get caught... I get a little bit more than grounded, ya know.”

“Yes,” Giles agreed, cleaning his goddamned glasses. “You’ll certainly need to be very careful.”

“And that’s not just through April, either,” Buffy pointed out. She sounded both glum and breathless, genuinely displeased, yet eager to keep talking about it. Giles ignored his complete knowledge of why this should be so, looking her politely in the forehead and listening. “At least according to the lawyer, even if I’m lucky enough to get probation, there’s definitely going to be a curfew involved. Of course,” she laughed, her amusement transparently less than genuine, “they could always just lock me up until I’m 21. Or try to.”

Giles brow furrowed. “Who are you using?” He asked. “Erm, for a lawyer I mean,” he added, much too embarrassed at having said something that merely rubbed up against being a double entendre, his foolish grin twisting into a grimace.

Buffy couldn’t help rolling her eyes, even though she was also blushing. She wanted to smack him. She also wanted to through him down on the table and fuck his brains out, which made her want to smack him even more.“My mom’s divorce lawyer,” she said,“Doug Graff, which I don’t even know why because we’re going to have to drive all the way to L.A. to see him, and I don’t think he knows that much about Juvenile Court anyway.”

Giles made a dissatisfied expression then seemed to come to a resolution. “Here,” he said, pulling a card out of his breast pocket, his illegal prescription drugs for un-knocking up underage girls pocket. “You need to call my lawyer, Hal Gaston.”Buffy reached out and took the card. Both of them pretended not to notice the sparks of sexual energy that leapt across the space where their fingers almost touched but didn’t quite. “Well...uhm...” said Giles clearing his throat, his voice becoming quiet, edged with guilt yet again. “Hal... has his... erm... his main office in Elmwood, but he keeps a satellite office in Sunnydale; he works quite a bit with the courts in this county. I’ve used him for some... complicated immigration issues, and I know he has extensive criminal experience. I don’t know about Juvenile Court specifically, but he has...connections. I suspect it’s _who_ you know round here worse than anywhere.”

“Thanks,” said Buffy, tucking the card into her purse, “I’m glad it’s your job to look out for me.” Her lovely-sad emerald eyes looked up at him with unbearable gratitude and longing.

“Would I be a _terrible_ person,” he said, turning to her, putting his hand over hers, “If I told you that I wish sometimes it wasn’t.”His touch felt so sexual that Buffy could hardly breathe. Their faces were inches apart, his big puppy-dog eyes staring down at her. Somehow or other her fingers had gotten laced through his, flesh filling the spaces between flesh.

“Yeah,” she whispered, “I mean no. I mean k—can’t we just...” A man could drown in those eyes. Giles hardly knew if they were begging him to kiss her or to leave her alone. She put her free hand on his other arm and move it upwards towards his shoulder. It was as much clarification as he needed, more than he could withstand. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. His hands were on her back and shoulders and running through her hair. His senses were flooded with her. In his mind he was already inside her. His heart pounded with passion and terror. But suddenly, he was seized by a much more acute biological compulsion.

Pushing Buffy from him he turned violently away, wracked with a cascade of sneezes. He groaned wretchedly, then coughed for a while, his whole body shaking. “D’you ever get the feeling,” he said plaintively, when he was able to draw breath again, “that a couple of gods have a bet to see who can make you the most miserable?”

Buffy smiles sardonically. “All the time,” she assured him.

“I don’t know what to do,” he declared. “I know what I ought to do, or what I ought not to do, but I don’t know... how not to do it.”

“I know what you mean,” Buffy admitted. “Whenever I get...whenever we get...” she dropped her eyes and turned her head slightly away. “I feel like I’m drunk,” she said, “but only about you, like I’m sober about everything else? But it’s the drunk part that feels right and the sober part that makes me nauseous. I’ve never felt—I mean not even about—”  Her voice broke.  Her eyes spoke only of agony.

“This _can’t_ work,” Giles argued earnestly.

“I _know_ that!” Buffy countered fiercely.

“It _shouldn’t_ work,” he continued all the more stridently, just as if she’d contradicted him. “It’s not right!”

“I _KNOW_ THAT!” Buffy repeated, raising her voice, all but yelling, close to tears. Then, hardly above a whisper, “I know all of that.”

Giles felt horrid, beneath contempt. Instinctively, he reached for her hand, to comfort her. She pulled it away. For an instance he thought this was solely because he’d hurt and offended her by whipsawing from imploring to rejecting her yet again. Then he realized they were no longer alone in the library. He stiffened, clearing his throat. “Oh erm, Oz, hello,” he said, smoothing his suit front self-consciously, feeling as if he’d actually been caught having sex with Buffy in broad daylight in the middle of the library. “I was just showing Buffy... that is Buffy was just showing me...”he let the sentence die amidst a moderate amount of coughing.

“Just a thought,” said Oz, “poker, not your game.”

“Yes, well...” Giles deflected, still immoderately embarrassed, “can I help you with something?”

“I need Buffy,” Oz informed them, half turning in her direction, “Or Willow does. It’s her Dad. He’s going to rise from his grave at the Star of David Cemetery, probably tonight.”

“Good Lord,” Giles gasped.

“Is she sure?” Buffy asked, sniffing as if she too were getting the flu.

Giles handed her a tissue. “Blow; don’t suck,” he said, his tone appallingly parental. Buffy rolled her eyes and took the tissue. He looked sort of apologetically exasperated with himself.

“The coroner found blood on his lips,” Oz cut in pointedly, slapping them both with reality,“It wasn’t his.”

“Damn,” said Buffy pensively. “That’s way on the other end of town, past the University, around Sunset Ridge. I’ll have to go before sunset, too. No way am I going to take a chance of missing him.”

“I’ll drive,” Oz offered.

“But,” said Buffy, “what am I going to do about—”

“Your mother,” Giles concluded.

“Exactly,” Buffy agreed, “she expects me to be waiting here at 5:30, but we need to leave before that.”

The three of them stood for a moment in contemplative silence.“I don’t think the ‘gas leak’ story will work again,” Giles murmured thoughtfully.

“I didn’t work the last time,” Buffy reminded him. “I was confined to my room for a month. Officially anyway.”

“I have a radical suggestion,”said Oz, “You could tell your mom the truth.”

“And she’s going to believe me because...?” Buffy demanded.

“Seeing Dr. Rosenberg rise from his grave might be a pretty good clue,” Oz suggested.

“Hey that’s right!” Buffy responded, with sarcastic enthusiasm, “And getting killed by Angel and his gang (who _will_ show up the minute the sun sets) that should really convince her!”

“Hey,” said Oz, spreading his hands before him, “Just trying to help.”

“Okay,” said Buffy, on her feet now, pacing, “So Mom’s coming and I’m going. That’s the problem, what do we do about it?”

“Well,” said Giles thoughtfully, “if we can’t....” He paused to sneeze. ”If we can’t satisfactorily explain your absence...” more coughing and sneezing followed.

“If we can’t explain my absence...” Buffy began, smiling now.

“—the police will likely be called.” Giles concluded.

“No they won’t,” Buffy informed him, “because my Mom isn’t going to come here.”

Giles was left behind for moment but Oz instantly dug her. “Ok,” he said, “how do we stop her from coming?”

“Car trouble?” said Buffy suggested.

“That’ll never work,” Giles interjected, “at most it will keep her busy for an hour or so. You don’t know how long it will take for this vampire to get himself up.”

“Which is why we’re not letting him set the pace,” Buffy informed him, “I’m going to dig him up.” There was a moment of stunned silence. “What?” said Buffy, “Anyone have a better suggestion?” No one did. “So let’s get moving,” Buffy went on. “Giles, you’ll have to stay here and run interference with Mom when she calls...”

“But shouldn’t I be...” his protest died in a fit of coughing, concluded with a groan of misery. His symptoms seemed to be coming back with a vengeance. “Right,” he said, “I’ll wait here for your mother to call.”

“We need more people than this, though,” Buffy went on, planning out loud. “We’ve got to dig fast. There’s a pretty high wall, so we can start a little before dark, but the longer we’re there, the more chance we’ll be seen.”

“And the more chance of being molested by vampires,” Giles pointed out.

“We should get Xander,” Oz suggested.

Buffy and Giles exchanged a look. “He’ll do it,” Buffy announced, concluding the unspoken debate. “It’s for Willow. Oz, you’d better be the one to ask him though. Things are kind of...” Buffy started to explain, but she could see that Oz got it. “Okay,” she recapped, “So Xander and I are digging. Giles is here. That leaves you to keep Mom busy... except then who’s getting me and Xander where we need to go, Cordelia?”

“Flat on her back,” Oz reminded her.

“As I should be,” Giles interjected miserably.

“Okay,” Buffy replanned, “so that’s me and Oz to dig and Xander to handle Mom... We need more people.”

“I really don’t think there’s anyone else we can safely involve,” Giles pointed out.

“Fine,” Buffy said, “Then that’s the plan. Oz, pick up Xander. Drop him off at the Gallery. Tell him to do something to Mom’s car... I don’t know... stick something up her tailpipe? Something to make it not move... Then maybe he could offer to help her with it... that way he can keep things moving slow and maybe warn us if she finds another way to come.”

"Don't worry," Oz assured Buffy. “I know exactly what to do to take care of your mom.”   

****

It was dark in the box,tight, hot, confining, but it smelled wonderfully of blood and pine resin. The demon that couldn’t help thinking of itself as Ira Rosenberg nodded approval in the close, silent dark. He was wearing a loose, flowing garment open at the back, his ass hanging out; but his bloodstained clothes were in the box with him. Rabbi Mike, Demon Ira decided. Again he approved. Rabbi Mike was a good Jew, conscientious, detail oriented. It was smart of Sheila to let him handle these things. If she’d tried to handle these kinds of things herself, she’d have only ended up rubbing everyone on the Rosenberg side of the family the wrong way, not that they’d ever admit it if she did everything just right anyway.

Of course, they’d all be mightily pissed off to learn that the mortal remains of Ira Rosenberg were up and walking around. But, he planned to time that disclosure so they’d be in a position to make their complaints directly to the ‘One True Judge.’ Let Him do something about it! Demon Ira wasn’t worried. This Earth was still more a devil’s dominion than not and he intended to walk the Earth a good long time. If only the sun would go down. He didn’t fear the sun. He didn’t fear anything, including death. But he was interested in doing a lot of things with the rest of his existence, and bursting into flames was not one of them. He waited.


	5. Buffy's Mom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Xander agrees to keep Joyce busy while Buffy makes a post curfew trip to the Cemetery, things take an unexpected turn.

It was a quarter past five when Joyce finally pushed her last customer out of the Gallery, more or less literally. She had told Buffy to wait for her until five-thirty and she was not about to give her the chance to ‘misunderstand’ and wander off. She was under court order to have her daughter home by six and, what was harder, to keep her there till six came again. Serial Killer or not, she was starting to think Ted had had the right idea about nailing Buffy’s window shut. Except that nails could be pulled out. Joyce slid her key into the lock, gave it a good turn and headed for the parking lot, her business secure for the night. She wished she could say the same for her daughter. Briefly, she considered cutting down the tree outside Buffy’s window. Knowing Buffy, though, she’d just climb onto the roof and down the front porch.

Lost in these unpleasant thoughts Joyce unlocked her black SUV and got inside without really even seeing it. She stabbed the key into the ignition and twisted. The engine didn’t respond, not even a groan of protest. “Whell!” said Joyce, exasperated, “that’s just great! That’s exactly what I need!” She tried the key a dozen more times, jamming it in and twisting angrily, knowing it was no use.

Joyce got out and slammed the door. As she stood there, fuming, she heard a familiar voice. “Hey there,” said Xander, “need a hand with that flat tire?”

“No,” Joyce started to explain plaintively, “my car won’t—” She glanced down along the flank of the intransigent vehicle. Sure enough, her right rear tire was flat as a swimmer’s chest. “Damn it!” She swore. “I do _not_ have _time_ for this.”

“If you have a jack,” Xander offered. “I could... um...jack it.” He grinned boyishly, totally aware of what he’d said. Of course, he was a boy.

“Don’t bother,” said Joyce, trying unsuccessfully to give him a severe, motherly look. She knew she ought to be annoyed, but he was a good kid. And she was maybe just a little flattered that she could still trigger the automatic lame flirting response in a goofy teenage boy. “I can’t get my motor to crank for anything,” she added, smiling a little embarrassedly as she realized that could probably be taken as an in kind response. “I’ll have to call a tow truck.”

Buffy’s friend seemed strangely worried by this suggestion. “No!” he shouted, gesturing dramatically to no apparent purpose. Joyce was as startled as she was puzzled. “No,” he repeated, a little more calmly, “uh, jumper cables. All you really need is someone to give you a good jump!” Maybe because he’s said a little too much or just because this time he really had said it without meaning to, the boy got embarrassed. He actually blushed, which made Joyce feel a little giddy and very, very foolish. He kept going, only making things worse, “not... that is... I didn’t mean... I mean... _I_ don’t have a car or anything, not that I wouldn’t, if I could, you know, help you get your motor going, I mean not that I couldn’t if I just had the right tool—”He looked away, his voice becoming almost inaudible, “You know, equipment or whatever.”

Feeling more a fool than ever, Joyce couldn’t help wondering if Xander had sabotaged her car just to get the chance to rescue her. She tried to tell herself the notion was ridiculous, that she was as delusional as Buffy if she thought this kid was really _interested_ in her rather than just embarrassed by his choice of words.

Suddenly, she was struck by an incongruous memory. A memory of a fantasy? A couple of weeks ago, the day those crazy scavenger hunters had destroyed the house, Joyce had looked into Xander’s eyes, innocently concerned at his distress and had suddenly imagined that something in his eyes said his distress was because he needed her. She remembered, sliding her hands along the contours of his well-formed arms and shoulders, kissing the back of his neck. The smell of a desirable male animal. Or at least, Joyce reminded herself, she remembered _imaging_ these things. It really had been a very long time since Joyce had had her motor cranked by anyone and long enough since she’d gotten out the old hand jack for that matter.

Just to prove herself a fool, just to confirm that there was no dangerous fantasizing on his part that she needed to put a stop to, not at all because she was really truly dying for a good jump, which she had no intention of getting from this boy in any sense, under any circumstances, even if she could, Joyce prodded at the seduction by rescue hypothesis just a little, testing it, expecting it to fail. Smiling warmly, tilting her head just a little, she invited the boy to follow her back to the Gallery, suggesting that he help her keep watch for anyone leaving the neighboring buildings that might be getting into one of the nearby cars and could give her the jump she needed.

He was supposed to point out that this didn’t make any sense, that the thing to do was to walk into the shop of someone she knew and ask for help, or to call someone with a car and cables, or something like that. Even if he didn’t know any better than to think that waiting to randomly solicit strangers in the parking lot for assistance was the best plan, he had to know it wasn’t a two person job. Joyce sneaked a look at him to see him sneaking a look at her. Still, none of it proved anything. He was just looking at her nervously because their conversation had made him nervous. He was just going back to her Gallery with her to be polite, helpful. He was just a little boy. Somebody else’s child. But for a little boy, he was awfully man-shaped.

Joyce sighed. “To be honest,” she said apologetically, “now that I think about it. I’m in too much of a hurry to wait for someone to come along and jump me.” Damn it, that was how she’d said it, even though you’d think she be on her guard by now. Good job, Joyce! She plowed on through her embarrassment. “I think I’m just going to call Triple A, otherwise I’ll be keeping some poor person tied up all evening by the time I get to the tire and everything. And I’ll be late getting Buffy picked up. There’s no reason for you to have to wait,” she added, then before she could stop herself, a polite after thought, “unless you need me to give you a ride.”

It wasn’t until Xander blushed behind his ears and made an inordinately complicated coughing noise,trying hard to keep a straight face and to the extent that he was failing, looking not so much amused as panicked, that Joyce realized even this last comment could be taken as suggestive by someone as suggestible as a seventeen-year-old boy. Xander stood stock still. He was panicked. Not so much by the idea of Buffy’s mom ‘giving him a ride’ although he wished the visual in his head of that looked a little more absurd to him, which it would have if he hadn’t had a not so flat bit of inflatable equipment in his pants that could totally stand to be jacked right about now. All the same, he felt pretty secure in the knowledge that he was in no real danger of being allowed to misbehave. Moms didn’t put up with that stuff.

He was panicked because things were moving too fast in the wrong direction in a very different and much more real sense. It wasn’t even five-thirty. It was supposed to take him until at least six o’clock to change Joyce’s tire before she even discovered that the car wouldn’t start. As it was, she could have a tow driver here in ten minutes, who could tighten her battery cables, fix the flat and have her back on the road by six tops.

“Giles!” he cried, suddenly realizing that his only hope was that Giles would have some kind of bright idea, which he _was_ Giles, so that was probably a pretty good hope,actually. But now Joyce was looking at him, puzzled. It was his turn to have a bright idea. “Giles can give Buffy a ride, uh home that is, he could take her home. Then he could come help with the car. I could wait. Here for him. With you.”

Joyce was more suspicious than ever that Xander was up to something strange although she was as far as ever from a guess as to what it really was. But she had to admit, calling Mr. Giles was a good idea. Even assuming he wasn’t willing to come mess around with her car, he could certainly make sure Buffy got home before curfew. She’d call him first and then Triple A. She explained that to Xander as she unlocked the door and invited him into the Gallery. He didn’t look all that pleased with the idea, but didn’t say much except, “I think I will wait with you. Otherwise I have a long walk home.”

Giles wanted to pick up the phone on the first ring, but it took him until the third to manage it. His symptoms were getting even worse. He wanted desperately to lie down on his own—Couch. He sighed heavily. “Hello?” he squawked nasally.

“Mr. Giles?” Joyce Summers asked apologetically, clearly sorry to intrude.

“Ahsh... Y—ahshew... Ahhhh, yes?” he managed between sneezes.

“Is Buffy there with you?” she asked. There was so much anxiety in her voice that if she hadn’t sounded quite so much like she thought she was the one with something to be sorry for, he’d have guessed she suspected what he had done. Half of him suspected it anyway despite the lack of evidence.

“Yes,” he repeated, “been here... Ah...all...Ah...afternoon...Ahshew... doing her... Ashew...her homework.”

Joyce sighed with audible relief. Giles was relieved with her... or against her as it were. “Is everything... alright,” he asked, now that he could be fairly certain what her answer would be.

Already, she was shifting from relieved to apologetic again. “Oh” she fumbled, “I’ve just been having a little car trouble and... and...” If Giles didn’t know any better he’d say she actually was feeling terribly guilty about something. “I’m sorry to have to ask you for a favor; I know you don’t feel well. But—I’m going to call Triple A—but could you please, if it’s not too much trouble give Buffy a ride home on your way?I honestly don’t know how we’re going to keep this curfew business up until Buffy goes back to court in April. It looks like we’re going to be late the very first night. And I certainly can’t blame Buffy for it.”

Giles pulled out his pocket watch and took a glance. It was just coming up on 5:35. Buffy would only be beginning her work at the cemetery. And Joyce was about to call Triple A, the Auto Club. A good idea, but only from her point of view, which certainly wasn’t his. “Your car?” Giles asked sympathetically, struck by sudden, desperate inspiration. “Well, what seems to be the trouble, maybe I can help?”

“Well,” said Joyce, “There’s a flat tire, and the... battery I guess... but I don’t want you to put yourself to any trouble... especially with you not feeling well... and with Buffy...”

“Nonsense,” said Giles trying very hard to suppress a cough, “I’ll just drop Buffy by your house, to make sure she’s home by six, then I’ll come see what I can do for you.”

“So, you did finally get your car back then?” she asked.

“Er... yes... very thoroughly cleaned too. I feel perhaps I ought to send a thank you note to the police station.” There was an awkward silence. Which was soon filled by Giles’ helpless, bone rattling cough.

“Are you sure you hadn’t better go home and rest?” Joyce asked again. “I’m sure Triple A—”

“Oh, I’ll be alright,” he assured her between continued bouts of coughing and sneezing.

“Well,” said Joyce skeptically, “I hope so. They say this flu bug is supposed to be pretty bad. People are coming into the Gallery in surgical masks.”

“Yes,” he said unable to help himself, “you Americans do tend to panic a bit about these things.”

“I see,” said Joyce coolly, “yes, well, be that as it may...”She was piqued.

“He did _not_ just say that!” Xander Harris could be heard to exclaim in the background, sounding genuinely astounded. Once again, Giles had managed to step on the arbitrarily and capriciously sensitive dignity of a nation that prided itself on its foolhardiness and was terrified of being thought cautious.

“Well, as young Mr. Harris is there with you,” Giles pressed onward, you needn’t worry about endangering my health. All you’ll need me for is my engine and a few feet of cable. Let the young man do all the work. Meanwhile I’ll drop Buffy by your house and I’ll see you in about... twenty or thirty minutes?”

Joyce agreed and they said quick goodbyes. “Well,” she said to Xander, who was sitting on her desk, his legs dangling nakedly from the ends of his khaki shorts right next to her, “we’ve got at least twenty minutes. That should be just about enough time to get that tire changed.”

“I don’t know,” he argued, “it’s starting to get dark out. Maybe we should stay inside and wait for Giles.” Joyce couldn’t help smiling at the thinness of the excuse. There was desperation in his eyes. He really did want her to stay here, alone with him, as long as possible. Maybe he really _had_ somehow sabotaged her car. Joyce shivered with a thrill of something that she was guiltily forced to admit to herself was not more than twenty percent horror. ‘Well why not?’ her lonely, secret, chronic lust pleaded. ‘You know damn well why not,’ her guilt chided her. ‘Mr. Giles will be here in twenty or thirty minutes,’ her rationality advised. ‘Twenty minutes is a lifetime!’ lust argued hopefully. 

It was Joyce’s turn to say something. Xander was waiting. She had more or less settled on something along the lines of, ‘It’ll be even darker in half an hour’ or ‘You’re an awfully big boy to be afraid of the dark.’ Without knowing she was going to, she stood up instead, agitated, moving instinctively. Again, without meaning to, she brushed against his legs in the process of standing. They made a glancing contact with what felt like more than half her body. Parts of her body that had not touched his sang in response. He looked into her eyes, desirous, terrified. He stood from the desk, descending and rising and advancing all at once, filling the space between them. He smelled every bit as desirable, every bit as male as she remembered imagining. Like a man. Exactly like.

She kissed him. There was no mistake, no ambiguity. Buffy’s mom had kissed him! In fact, she still was kissing him, and he was kissing him back. Was this a good thing? It _felt_ like a good thing. But what he felt was probably wrong. It seemed to work that way a lot. But then he felt her hands on his body, his shoulders, his back, his ass and it didn’t seem to matter as much whether it was a good thing or not. He put his hands on her breasts. They felt like any girls breasts, maybe softer. When she didn’t do anything to stop him, he hurriedly unbuttoned her shirt so he could get at them better. Right and wrong were getting less important by the second, as his dick got harder, brushing against the vicinity of her female parts through two set of clothes. She was almost exactly as tall as he was, which was strangely convenient if you wanted to make out with someone while standing up.

‘Oh my God, I’m making out with Buffy’s mom!’ he thought again. He was kind of horrified, but it felt too damn good to not to keep doing it. Because now they were a little bit past making out. She had her hand inside his unzipped shorts, inside his underwear, pulling his dick out, stroking it gently, a little less gently. She was jacking him off! God it felt good.  “God that feels good!” he exhaled, half a sigh, half a groan.

Damn it Joyce, stop! What are you doing? This isn’t right! “Touch me!” she said, pushing him back against the desk so that it was bearing part of their weight, “Put your fingers inside me.”

Suddenly, Xander found the idea of a skirt very confusing, confounding even. Did they go down or up? He had pulled Cordelia’s down, but up seemed easier in this instance. Cordelia! Xander’s hands froze in place, already gripping Joyce’s bush inside her panties. Suddenly, it didn’t matter a single bit if more-than-making-out with Buffy’s mom was a good thing or not. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been Buffy. He wasn’t free to do it.

He retracted his hand, letting her skirt fall back into place, and turned his head aside. Joyce took the hint and her hands off his penis. She looked hurt and confused and guilty and embarrassed and just a little bit mad as she buttoned her blouse. “I can’t” he apologized. “I have a girlfriend.”Joyce nodded, wiping tears from her eyes. Oh, God! He’d made her cry. This was not some girl, this was Buffy’s mom. Definitely not a good thing. His fingers were damp and smelled of female sex. “Look, I’m sorry!” he began again.

“Just get out,” Joyce whispered bitterly.

“But your—”

“I can change my own damned tire!” Joyce said. And she did.

 


	6. Off Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cars aren't the only things crossing the double yellow, with disastrous results.

Giles grabbed his crossbow and about thirty rounds and got in his Citron, headed for the cemetery. He hoped it had been clear to Xander that that was where he’d be going, that it was still his job to keep Joyce busy and distracted until at least six-thirty and as long thereafter as possible. He hoped the boy could handle her without further assistance. He couldn’t stand idly by any longer. He had to go to Buffy, to be whatever help he could to her. He drove fast, plunging recklessly through the night towards her. When he turned into the curve around Sunset Ridge and saw the body lying across the road he had just enough time that if he had acted instantly he could have stopped. He felt absolutely no temptation. This was one of the oldest tricks in the vampire book because it worked so well, on almost anyone. Show a human being a fellow in distress and he will stop to render aid. Rupert Giles knew better.

He was tempted to stomp on the accelerator and plow right over the retched thing. On the off chance it was a human being,he swerved around it instead. That was a mistake. Three things happened at once that should not have. The Citron weaved around the body, into the oncoming lane at the center of the curve, within inches of the narrow shoulder and the precipitous plunge below. Giles involuntarily closed his eyes and relaxed his grip on the wheel, giving in to a sneeze. The ‘body’ rose into a low crouch and shoved the car sideways with all its vampiric might. The wheels lost contact with the pavement. Suddenly Giles realized he was airborne, tumbling sideways in space. Just as suddenly he realized nothing at all.

****

Xander didn’t know where to go, what to do. At first he headed for the payphone at the gas station four blocks away, intending to page Buffy. Three and a half blocks in, he realized that wasn’t a good idea. He needed to speed her up, not distract her. He wished he knew how to do that thing where you could make an actual message show up in text form on the beeper screen or if her beeper even did that, but he didn’t. Besides how could he explain what he had to say in two or three words?

He turned around and started in the direction of Main Street, which was the B route of the Pacific Coast Highway, thinking he’d head for the cemetery, that he could help Buffy. But he had only a general idea where it was. Somewhere past Sunset Ridge. Five or ten miles away.

He turned back around and started for home in the menacing gloam, his hand on the cross in his pocket. It really was a long walk. Whatever was going on someplace else, there was always the risk of a stray vampire or two. Or that Angel’s crew only wanted Buffy to think that they’d be at the cemetery. Or they could have split up.

Xander sped up a little hurrying toward home. He was almost there when he was suddenly struck by a new horror. He’d left Joyce alone. Planning to go outside. Into the plenty-dark-enough. And crouch with her back to the world, her head down and an immovable mass of metal and glass between her and any chance to run. To change a tire.

****

Sweat stung Buffy’s eyes but she ignored it. She kept on, relentless, delving deeper and deeper into the earth, forcing it to open up to her, to reveal what was hidden within. Oz worked alongside her in grim, urgent silence. They were both shedding clothing. Jackets and hats were tossed aside. This was not the kind of work where Slayer strength was a whopping advantage. No matter how strong Buffy was, she could still only turn one shovel full of dirt at a time. They were getting close, but not close enough. They had to get all the way in. They had to finish. They had to do it quick. The sun was going down.

It was already dark enough for Vampires to start coming en mass. Buffy knew that Angel knew exactly where she was, that he had set up this date for her. ‘A losing proposition, but one you can’t refuse.’ At least there were no sewer grates around here, and obviously, no mausoleums in the Jewish cemetery. They would have to come up through an opening somewhere else in town, then walk or drive out here and come through the gate or over the wall. She should at least be able to see them coming. She was way more worried about Oz’s safety than her own. She’d have told him to beat it, but he wouldn’t have, so there was no reason to waste time tugging the idea back and forth.

At last their shovels clonking against the hardness of wood. Buffy put her finger to her lips and boosted Oz a up out of the hole. She brushed aside as much of the remaining dirt as possible. Crouching against the lip of the pit, slightly above and to the side of the coffin, the Slayer pulled hard on the simple iron latch, breaking it apart. In one smooth motion, she pushed pack the lid and leaned over the open box, stake in hand, ready to thrust. There he lay, eyes closed, mouth relaxed in a perfect expression of peace. He was clothed in long robes of flowing white, his glasses perched serenely on his nose, looking at once scholarly and angelic. Buffy knew too much to be deceived by angelic appearances. Or scholarly ones.

Her mind racing, she brought up her arm to strike. What was actually supposed to happen if you staked a potential vampire _before_ the demon was risen in it? Did the demon invade the body at the time of death, or at the time of rising? Would the penetration of the wood itself awaken the demon within? Would it burn to dust or just lie there? Would it make any difference to the condition of the soul? Should she be ramming a stake in every victim the vampires had ever taken, just in case? Alternatively, if the demon didn’t enter until rising, would putting a stake in the body keep it out at all? Would it be necessary to _leave_ the stake in? Should she take his head off, just in case? Buffy had no answers to these questions. There was no time to contemplate them now.

Falling upon the mortal remains of Ira Rosenberg, she plunged her stake deep into the upper left side of his chest through the ribcage, below the breast bone. Ira’s eyes flew open, filled with shock and terror. But, as they morphed from brown to yellow in a face that became a snarling, demonic mask, shock and terror were replaced by sneering hatred. “Fool!” he hissed, grabbing the stake from his own chest and striking Buffy in the mouth with the butt of it. Buffy winced and caught her breath, struggling to understand what was happening to her. She knew her aim had been exact.

Demon Ira seized his attacker by the throat. In the dim glow of the fading sunset, he recognized her. Buffy Summers, Willow’s hot little friend from school. She was a little more than half dressed for once; she had pants on her legs and a bra under her shirt. None of it hid the fact that she was built for nothing but sex. Well, maybe one other thing. The Summers girl was surprisingly strong, Ira realized. She wretched herself out of his grasp as if he had been no more than a middle aged physician after all, butting him hard in the face with her skull and jamming her stake in again. It hurt like he was going to die. Maybe he only _felt_ like he should have been supernaturally strong and powerful. Or maybe what little sunlight there was was getting to him. He was grappling with the girl for his very existence, and she did not seem to be giving up, or tiring. She had the endurance of a porn star getting paid double time. Crazy as the notion seemed, he couldn’t help thinking that maybe that lithe, limber little body was actually built to kill vampires.

****

Even at a distance in the deepening dark, it was plain to see that the woman standing by Joyce’s car was too blonde, too short and too young. If Xander hadn’t known any better, he’d have though it was Buffy. But he did know better. He started to run. At three yards and closing fast, the demon rounded on him, fangs bared, snarling. He hurtled towards her, holding his cross aloft, shoving it in her face. She scrambled to get out of his way, putting the car between them; holding position there, hissing angrily. Joyce was slumped against her newly affixed donut, moaning half unconsciously. She had been thumped with a tire tool, from the vampires perspective, probably pretty gently.

It was only when the engine started that Xander noticed the second blonde vamp, sitting up in the driver’s seat with a triumphant toss of her flaxen locks. Evidently they’d already tightened the battery cables. Grinning, Vampette Number One opened the rear driver’s side door to get in. Her doppelganger gunned the engine. “Oh God!” Xander moaned. He pulled Joyce to her feet just as the car door slammed and dragged her at a drunken, stumbling run towards the building. It was a high curb, the car got hung up on it for a moment, turning so tightly towards it, as close as they were, from a dead stop. It would have been enough time to get inside. If Joyce had had her keys in her hand. The way Vampette Number Two had had to get down under the steering column to Xander said ‘hotwire’ but Joyce was either too scared or too concussed to answer his frantic questions about where the keys actually were.

The SUV backed up off of the curb with a clatter and turned sideways in the street. It might have had the soul of a station wagon, but it was built on the chasse of an off road truck and when the demon stomped the peddle the body did what it was made to do. Big wheels rolled up and over the curb. The steel and glass monstrosity barreled at them, still picking up speed. Xander jumped aside, pushing Joyce before him. She was still dazed, disoriented. She stumbled to the ground as the car slammed heavily into the building, missing them by eighteen inches.

Glass shattered around them. He dragged her to her feet and into the almost alley that twisted through narrow spaces between Sunnydale’s semi-ancient buildings in the oldest part of downtown. It was too narrow for the SUV. They ran.

****

Seconds stretched into minutes as Oz stood helplessly staring down at the two figures struggling down there in the box. If the vampire had ever once gotten on top, he supposed he could have leapt down on top of him, but as it was, he would have been leaping on to Buffy’s back. Not his idea of helping.

He scanned the gate area and all along the perimeter of the cemetery. No sign of backup vampires yet, but he’d have bet his modem, comic book collection and both guitars they were on their way. He held a shovel before him, blade first, ready to jab and slice, but he had no other weapons. Looking back towards the battle of the pine box, searching for an opening, he remained alert for the sound of cars. For the first time in a long time, he wished he hadn’t quit smoking pot in the tenth grade. Then at least he might have had a cigarette lighter. He wondered if there might be one of Devon’s in the van. If so, he had an idea.

****

The car had landed hard against some kind of solid object in the darkness. A tree, Edwards saw, as he scrabbled, cursing, down the slope towards the spot, and lucky it had. Otherwise it would have rolled all the way down the mountain with the target inside. He had been told to try not to kill him. Angel had more elaborate plans for his the eventual death of his miserable, pathetic rival. Of course, he might or might not already be dead. He might be bleeding to death right now. Damn it, why couldn’t the bastard stop for a body in the road like everyone else?

Edwards reached the wreck, ripped off the now top-facing passenger door and peered down into the cavity. Rupert Giles lay unconscious against the spider webbed safety glass of the driver’s side window. Blood ran freely from a gash in his forehead on the downhill side, a feast going to waste. Edwards resisted. He might not be master of much in this world, but he had always prided himself on his ability to master his own base urges when he had need. Well, almost always. He did have one irresistible weakness. But she was busy looking for other trouble right now.

Carefully, gently, slowly, Edwards eased himself into the tight space along with the librarian. Bracing himself against the seat and the steering column so that he wouldn’t fall on top of the man, he unfastened his seatbelt and turn his head for a closer look at his wound. It was as bad as the delicious ambiance suggested. He needed something to stop the bleeding, and fast.

A cardboard box full of apparently random things was spilled against the back left window: several flimsy pieces of paper, a tire gauge, jumper cables, a flashlight. The contents of the vehicle, boxed up and inventoried,probably by the police. Edwards examined the stuff that protruded from the lip of the box. He found a sturdy pink cloth, filthy but absorbent, of the type used to clean windshields at full service gas stations. He held the dampening folds of the rag firmly against the bleeding slash in the victim’s head with one hand, thrusting the other into the box once more, seeking something to hold the bandage in place.

His hand closed around something slender and stretchy. When he pulled it out and got a good look at it,he laughing. It was perfect. Better than a scarlet letter. He tied the bra around Mr. Giles’ head as tightly as he could, trying to put maximum pressure on the place where the fountain of life issued forth. It was a front clasp design; the two cups at the tying ends made a big floppy bow on the side of the head opposite the wound. Edwards hoped Angel would appreciate the joke. Normally it was more or less his style if a bit unsubtle, but he was sickeningly close to being really, truly in love with the girl himself.

Edwards shuttered. Everyone thought Drusilla was the crazy one, that Angel was strong and hard and driven by cool calculation. But Edwards had been around long enough to know who was the father of that madness. He’d tried to warn Darla, who was also his sire, a dozen times that her handsome young favorite would bring an end to her with his mad obsessions, but she had thought he was merely jealous, as if his beloved were not enough, as if he had to seek her incestuous embrace!

But he had been right. Angel had been so warped and perverted by the ensoulation that he had suffered at the hands of the Gypsies that he had killed their sire with his own hand. The uninterrupted continuation of the same obsession that had driven him to that act left Edwards far from convinced that he was fully recovered. The idea of a vampire fucking a Slayer, especially with her consent, was sheer lunacy. Calling it ‘love’ was beyond insane. Madder still if it were true.

****

Xander expected the vamps to get out and give chase, but they didn’t. Maybe they’d been injured, or at least stunned, maybe they’d lost them. After a few minutes they stopped to catch their breath and get their bearings. They were in a narrow space between the Shoe Outlet and the long closed feed store, maybe two blocks from the mall. “The keys were in my purse,” Joyce explained, as if that were still the issue, “I dropped it in the gutter and everything spilled down the sewer grate.”

Xander was standing very close to her, even considering the tightness of the little passage. Their hearts were pounding. They were both pumped full of adrenaline. She was also pumped full of endorphins, Joyce realized. She couldn’t even feel the knot on her head. If he gave her the least bit of encouragement, she’d probably grab the boy and fuck him right here. She did grab him and kiss him, just on spec. Something was wrong. She knew that much. She normally had more impulse control than this. Not that she’d shown much this evening, but this felt different somehow. It didn’t matter. Her impulses didn’t want to be controlled.

His mouth had kissed her back, she knew it had, but his hands grabbed her forcefully by the shoulders and pushed her away from him. “There’s no time for that!” he scolded her. “We’re not safe here. We have to get inside!” Joyce knew he was right. She felt the back of her head throbbing again as her heart slowed a little. Someone was after them, trying to kill them. But suddenly she was kissing him again anyway. He pushed her away again, or tried to. The wall was at her back this time. His pushing didn’t put any space between them. She put her hands on his backside and pulled him against her. He was definitely kissing her back now, no two ways about it. She seized the moment, unfastening his pants and pulling his cock out.

Joyce felt dizzy, but the wall steadied her. Her vision was blurred, so she closed her eyes. She felt terribly drunk but didn’t remember drinking anything. Her lover’s cock was half hard already. Moment by moment her touch stiffened him. She didn’t think to wonder why they were outside, or who he was. Her shirt had come loose from her waistband and he slid his hands up and under it. He pushed the front of her bra up over her breasts in the thoughtless way of young men in a hurry. It pinched and constricted her flesh, but she didn’t complain. Her breasts were grateful for his touch. Her nipples sang. Over the whole surface of her body pleasurable sensation was intensified, pain dimmed.

“I want your cock inside me, now!” Joyce demanded loudly. Xander knew what was happening wasn’t really right, that he’d probably be sorry after. But he’d already turned down her hot, experienced sex once tonight and being in desperate fear of death wasn’t good for his willpower. Plus his dick was just too hard to say no. She smelled too much like sex. He pushed her skirt up and she let go of his dick to pull her hose and panties down. He didn’t look to see if they were the sexy or the sensible kind. He didn’t think he wanted to know. It was what was on the inside that counted, and that was his dick.

Xander braced himself against the wall, his right palm splayed upon the brick. Joyce’s wet twat enveloped him. She gasped and literally went weak in the knees. He wrapped his left arm around her back, her right side resting in the crook of his elbow, just above the waist, the tips of his fingers touching her left breast under her raised shirt. They fucked. It didn’t take long. He had no control at all, not that she seemed to want him to use any. In two minutes, maybe less, he was coming inside her.

“I’m dying,” Joyce whispered. Her tone was one of awe but not exactly of pleasure. If she meant that she was about to come already, it was a weird way of saying it. He’d actually heard it called that once in a book of poetry that belonged to Ira Rosenberg, which Willow had showed him when they were about eleven, but that wasn’t the way she’d said it. She went limp in his arms. Her head lolled to the side. Her eyes rolled back. Xander screamed and almost dropped her. If he hadn’t had a wall to hold on to, he might have. His spent and almost totally deflated penis flopped out of her vulva. Semen dripped down her legs onto the ground. He cradled her as best he could in one arm and put his other hand to her neck, feeling for a pulse.

Suddenly, Xander’s head snapped erect at the sound of growling. Vampires. Nearby. He’d said there was no time for sex. He should have listened.

 


	7. Was That the Funny Part?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following a miraculous resolution to the struggle at the cemetery, Buffy finds Giles where one of Angel's minions had left him like a present for her, wrapped with a pretty bow. Helena Finds Peter exactly where she expects him, and Xander knows he left Joyce around here... somewhere.

Buffy was getting frustrated. This was supposed to be a quick mercy staking, not an all-night stab-a-thon. She had plunged her weapon into Ira’s body a dozen times, breaching all along the left side of the chest and even a couple of times on the right, every conceivable place a person’s heart should be. His white robes were shredded, revealing huge, ugly seams where his pallid chest had been sewn shut post-autopsy. That was it! “You know, Doc,” she panted, “I just don’t believe your heart is in the right place anymore!”

A mean laugh came from deep in Demon Ira’s throat, so different from the living Dr. Rosenberg’s. “My, my,” he grunted, “no... respect... for the dead,”

“I’m the kind of girl who laughs at a funeral,” Buffy confirmed with cheerful bravado. Somehow, the heart thing had crystallized matters in her mind. She was no longer fighting Willow’s father, just a vampire, albeit a pretty feisty one.

He managed to get both hands on the stake again. They held it between them, pointed more or less at nobody. “Getting tired yet, little Buffy?” he asked nastily.

“No, not a bit,” she grunted, although she was actually kind of starting to.

“Well, a cunt can take a lot of pounding,” the vampire grinned, “I should know.”

“I guess I’ll just have to pound you a little harder then,” Buffy countered.

Demon Ira smiled. “They’re coming,” he said serenely. “I can feel them. They’re almost here.” The next thing he felt was Buffy’s rock hard skull hitting him in the face again.

****

At last, through a break in the underbrush, Angel saw the six-sided wrought-iron star that gaped like a giant cunt in the middle of the huge swinging gate of the Star of David Cemetery. The gate itself was propped wide open, inviting all comers. He motioned for his minions to follow him across the clearing to the entrance.

As they broke the tree line, they saw an amusing sight. A pint-sized, redheaded boy was crouched in the shadow of an idling van, holding a shovel with what looked like a ball of wet socks tied to one end. It looked like some kind of bizarre, inverted genitalia. It was ‘Oz’, the werewolf pup who, if he had an actual pair of balls under his stick,would be fucking Willow Rosenberg by now. Angel smelled the gasoline and grinned. So, this kid was ready for a fight, was he? 

The vampires continued to advance slowly, nonchalantly now that they could see what guarded Buffy’s gate. As they got closer and saw the cigarette lighter aflame, in the boy’s other hand, they nudged each other, picturing him holding his tiny flame to those gas soaked rags under his own nose. This was going to be hilarious.

Suddenly, as if finally comprehending the danger, the kid leapt aboard his van, letting his shovel dangle absurdly out the window. He tossed the lighter like a grenade at the end of the makeshift weapon. Instead of flickering out and falling uselessly to the ground, it stayed lit and ignited the torch end at a safe distance from the van. The kid had taped the button down. The young werewolf revved his engine and barreled straight into the crowd of vampires, his flaming lance thrust before him. It wasn’t funny anymore.

****

Still not sure if she was dead or alive, Xander hefted Joyce over his right shoulder, prepared to run as best he could with so heavy a burden. He took one step and tripped over his pants, which were still around his ankles. He fell forward, banging his limbs on both walls and his exposed dick and balls on the ground. He landed face down with his head in Joyce’s cummy crotch, gravity literally rubbing his nose in what he’d done, fucking Buffy’s poor mother when she’d been hit on the head too hard to have any better sense. A wheedling little voice inside him pleaded that she’d been pretty much ready to fuck him long before she took the first blow, but he ignored it. He wanted his guilt. He deserved it. He’d be lucky if the added trauma from him dropping her on the ground didn’t kill her.

He tugged his pants into place and stood up, pulling the cross from his pocket. He looked around for the vampires he knew were bound to attack at any moment. Joyce groaned. Xander had never heard such a wonderful sound in his life. She was alive! He bent to try to help her up. The creature sprang from the darkness and landed in the middle of his back, tearing at him with fang and claw. He tried to twist around, to get the cross between them, but the space was too narrow. He used it to his advantage as best he could, banging the vampire between his body and the wall, grinding her against the bricks.

She was not a skilled fighter, had probably not been at it, in fact, even as long as he had. He managed to slam her head against the wall with his shoulder hard enough to stun her for a moment. It was long enough to pull himself free and scuttle back from her a few feet along the narrow passageway. At last, he got his cross up. He thrust it before him, rose to a low crouch and charged, striking her in the face. She screamed and scrambled backward, trying to get to her feet to run away. Xander barreled into her, landed on top and straddled her ducking a facefull of claws. His cross was sharpened at one end. He held the cross piece in both hands and drove it like a jackhammer into her chest. He pushed as hard as he could with all the strength in both shoulders and twisted, forcing his way into her heart while she screamed and flayed great swathes of skin from his back. As she exploded to a pile of dust, a horrible word echoed through the ally, a frantic, hysterical accusation. The dying demon had screamed “Rape!”

****

London, UK, May 26, 1925

"They flee from me that sometime did me seek."  She said it the minute he turned the corner of a long set of shelves near the back of the Council Archive.  Exactly as if she had been waiting for him.  Peter folded his arms and denied her an answer, not about to be drawn into a discussion of who was or was not getting what they deserved out of this this... transaction.  

"You were certainly looking well at church on Sunday," she tried again.  "Your poor wife looked a little... tired though, didn't she?"

"Leave her out of this, Helena!" he demanded in a harsh whisper.  

"Dear Lord," she mocked him dryly.  "You're right(!) I've overstepped my bounds. However will I live with myself."

"I have Emma with me," he pleaded, casting a worried glance over his shoulder at the little child who was making her unhurried way down the isle behind him, drumming her chubby baby fingers on her chin and squinting carefully at the spines of the Record volumes, her tiny brow furrowed.  

"Yes," Helena agreed, smiling viciously.  "You do seem to have become quite the dutiful father lately.  It's almost as if Myrna were afraid to send you out alone.  Still.  I can't imagine a three-year-old being much of a chaperon, let alone a body guard."

"Perhaps not," Peter countered, "but she does report everything she sees.  Loudly, repeatedly and unedited."

"Really?" said Helena, her tone viciously bright, "Does she repeat four letter words?"

"Damn you, Helena!" Peter shouted quietly, "this is between us!"

"Yes," she agreed smoothly, "It is.  Just between us.  And if you want it to stay that way,  I except to see you at my flat tonight.  Alone."

****

“Cocksucking, motherfucking mongrel son-of-bitch!” Angel cursed as he circled back through the brush to come at the gate another way. He had wanted his minions to see him give Buffy the thumping she deserved. Now they were scattered, some killed or worse, badly burned. He didn’t need more convalescents on his hands. Spike was enough. This was supposed to be a goddamned vampire nest, not a fucking charity hospital. He made a mental note to move both Willow and her furry little friend to the top of his to be killed, raped or castrated list.

In the meantime, audience or no, he was going to pound the shit out of Buffy one way or the other. Creeping along the edge of the high stone wall, working his way back towards the gate, Angel kept an eye out for his lover. He could smell her sweat. Vaguely, he wondered if she had finished off Rosenberg yet, not that it mattered. He had already done his main job, keeping Buffy occupied for a couple of crucial days. He was exceeding expectations by luring her here tonight. It’d be nice if he could pay a visit to his wife and daughter later, but demons don’t pray for miracles.

Reaching the gate, Angel trailed a hand lazily around the splayed petals of the Star of David. It didn’t burn him like the cross, which for some reason he didn’t quite understand he had always found both comforting and amusing. But this time was different. His hand was not burned, but he pulled back against his own volition as if he had been.

There was a queer stirring of the air. Something powerful brooded within those gates. Something disturbed from a long rest. Scanning the cemetery for a glimpse of the unseen power, Angel found his eye arrested by the figure of a woman in white robes of flowing marble. Her gaze pierced him. She glowed iridescent in the moonlight.

There was no moonlight.

Angel tried to tell himself that the prickling he felt along his scalp was no more than superstition. Even if there was something real and powerful inside that gate, he too was real and powerful. He could deal. Not allowing himself to think about it another second, Angel thrust himself into her domain. He was thrown violently back again.

The marble goddess glowed brighter by the second, now indisputably lit from within. Her hair and robe were no longer frozen in imitation of movement. The marble was flowing. In her eyes a very different kind of glow began to grow. Shrieking with rage and terror, Angel pulled the collar of his jacket up over his head and scrambled for the tree line. He had just enough time to curl into a ball, his face in the dirt, before the burst of sunlight filled the night sky.

If anyone who knew Daniel Osborne could have seen his face at that moment, they would have been sure the world was coming to an end. Oz’s eyes widened by increments to twice their normal size. His mouth hung slightly open as he watched the field of scattered vampires ignite like so many birthday candles. It lasted only seconds, but those seconds contained all the light and hope of a bright new day.

Buffy and Ira ceased to struggle against one another. They stiffened and were still, joined as one in their disbelief. Her right hand was buried deep inside him,arrested amidst the search for his misplaced heart. Flames began to dance along his skin. Strange flames. Pale flames. Cold flames. With a shriek and a wisp of smoke, the demon was burned out of him. There before Buffy’s eyes, in the glow of what now seemed nothing more than ordinary moonlight, his face a mask of pure serenity, lay the body of Ira Rosenberg. She was holding his heart in her hand. She released it, leaving it where it belonged. Her arm was covered in his blood. She wiped the blood onto his torn white robes, leaving it where it belonged too.

Thrusting herself up from the coffin, Buffy shut the lid and scrambled up to the edge of the grave to peer over the side, searching for the source of the mysterious light. There was nothing unearthly to be seen. Maybe someone, somewhere had done a spell or said a very effective prayer on Dr. Rosenberg’s behalf.

Or maybe, Buffy realized, it was something about this place. It was called the Star of David. What was the sun but a star, anyway? And who was this David guy, exactly? Sort of a ‘Jack the Giant Slayer’ type, but somehow or other a bigger deal than that because he was also called King David and had something to do with Bethlehem, speaking of stars. 

Shivering from the chill in the air as well as general mysteriousness, Buffy crawled from the grave, slipped back into her jacket and began filling in the earth with her shovel. Oz joined her. They worked once again in silence. All she really knew was that one way or another, a miracle had happened. The body and soul of Ira Rosenberg were at rest.

****

The lightning caught Edwards by surprise. It couldn’t have been nearby because he never saw a bolt of electricity, but it was bright. In fact, there was something about it. Something holy and terrible. For a full three minutes he stood on the roadside above the capsized car holding his limp captive in his arms like a bridegroom, gazing up at the sky. He waited for the sound of thunder. It never came. Because that wasn’t lightning. The demon cried out in anguish, dropped his useless forgotten victim on the asphalt and ran towards the cemetery, in search of his beloved.

****

Xander looked around the ally. Joyce was gone! For a couple of minutes he searched in gullies and behind trashcans, but in his heart of hearts, he knew what had happened to her. She’d been taken. To be killed or turned. He’d have search all night anyway, but he was bleeding badly enough to need immediate medical attention.

Without expecting to, Xander slammed his fist hard into the brick wall of the old feed store. It hurt like hell, but he bore the pain with no more than a grunt. He was pretty sure some of his fingers were broken. He honestly didn’t give a shit. If he hadn’t jabbed a nail in Joyce’s tire, she’d still be alive and well.

****

The process of filling the grave went a lot faster. Slayer strength was highly useful for pushing a huge mass of dirt into a gaping pit. Within a very few minutes, Buffy and Oz looked at one another and, without even the need for a nod, began walking back towards the van. Nearly to the gate, Oz looked back. Buffy followed his gaze. In the midst of the headstones stood the figure of a tall, slender woman in white marble. Her long hair was frozen in the moment of being blown back from her face. There was something unsettlingly familiar about her. Oz must have felt it too, because he turned and walked to her. Buffy followed.

The resemblance was not uncanny. Her chin was not the same. Her mouth was not the same. Her nose was not _exactly_ the same. But as the two teens stood and gazed up at the marble goddess, there was no denying that they were looking into the _eyes_ of Willow Rosenberg. At the base of the statue, below her bare feet, was inscribed the name ‘Rachel Gardien’. On each foot was carved a symbol: on her right, the Star of David; on her left, it’s unique lines and curves etched in Buffy’s mind by the cares of another lifetime, the DuLac cross.

Buffy shivered. “Come on,” she said to Oz, “I’ve got to get home.”

“Yeah...” said Oz vaguely as if he were only partly aware of Buffy’s presence, like a sleeper who answers without waking, but he turned and followed her back to the van.

As Oz rounded the corner, coming into the big curve around Sunset Ridge, they both saw the body lying in the road. Oz slammed on the breaks. Buffy almost warned him not to stop; she had a strong sense that this was vampire related. Just in time, she saw that it was Giles. Bounding from the vehicle, she ran to him and lifted him in her arms.

She must have looked absurd holing a six-foot something man with one arm under his knees and the other against his back, like the inverted cover of a Harlequin Romance. Buffy didn’t give a rat’s ass. She curled her arm more tightly around his upper body so that she could put her fingers to his neck. She found his pulse, weak, but steady. Her heart resumed beating. She could breathe again.

Suddenly, Buffy was filled with knowledge, with clarity. He was not a father to her, not a mentor, not a friend, not a lover or a not-a-lover, he was Giles, just Giles, her Giles, the only one in the world, precious, uncategorizable, irreplaceable. She loved him right or wrong, whatever anyone thought, including him. Tears welled up in Buffy’s eyes, but there was no time for tears.

There was blood all over Giles’ face and clothes. Beneath the blood, his flesh was pale. His tire tracks swerved into the oncoming lane then stopped abruptly, parallel to a sudden gap in the tree line fronted by a row of mangled stumps. For a moment, Buffy though he must have crawled up from the wreck before passing out, but his hands were clean except for blood. His head had been bandaged with some kind of a pink cloth, tied in place with what looked like a white nylon strap. Her eyes widened. She saw exactly what it was.

“We have to get out of here! Now!” Buffy informed Oz urgently, surprised it wasn’t already palpably too late, still expecting the trap to spring at any moment. Incredibly, they got the van’s cargo doors both open and closed with the three of them inside. They got away. It helped that Oz wasn’t one to ask questions under these type of circumstances.

“My bra,” Buffy explained, unbidden, once they were underway. “The vamps used my bra to tie the bandage around his head, then left him lying in the road. Angel’s idea of a joke.”

“It’s funnier than his last one,” Oz pointed out, blank-faced.

Buffy had to admit, that much was definitely true, and not just because it was hard to imagine anything less funny than being all ready to make love to someone and oops, there’s her corpse in your bed with her murderer’s cum all over it. The big, floppy, bunny-eared bow, the idea of _that_ being the symbolic indictment of forbidden passion, was so absurd that, even under the circumstances, she could have laughed, but then she would have had to have wept. Instead, she stuffed everything down, trying to keep it cool until they could get him to the hospital.

“Ohhhh,” Giles groaned. Then he murmured something that might or might not have been ‘Buffy’ or ‘mercy’ or any other two syllable word ending in a long E. Then he was racked with such a combination of deep, wheezing coughs and gut wrenching groans of agony that it was hard for _Buffy_ to breathe just listening to it. He sounded like either a beached whale dying or an asthmatic dragon having an orgasm.

“Giles!” Buffy gasped, tears spilling down her cheeks now, “I’m here, I’m here, can you hear me? Giles can you hear me? Hold on, please hold on!” Buffy cradled Giles’ head in her lap. He coughed up a bloody clot of mucus onto her pants. “Buffy,” he murmured a little more clearly between groans, “the... fire... we have to get... out.”

Buffy put the back of her hand to Giles’ forehead, “You’re burning up,” she murmured.

“Yes!” Giles agreed hysterically, trying feebly, but frantically to rise, “The Fire! The Fire! Jenny, we have to get out!”

“Shussssshhhh,” Buffy whispered, rubbing his cheek soothingly, “It’s all right. It’s alright. You’re safe now. Everyone’s safe.” But her face was etched with pain and fear.

“Christine! Christine!” Giles shouted, “Get out of there! He’ll kill you!”

“He has a high fever,” Buffy explained.

“We’ll be at Sunnydale General in ten minutes if we don’t stop at your house.” Oz replied.

“Don’t stop,” said Buffy.

“Well if they lock you up, fair warning,” Oz said. But he didn’t say it the way people usually say it that means you’re an idiot if you keep doing what you’re doing. He said it like a fair warning to a competent person who could make her own decision. Buffy nodded.

“Buffy!” Giles wailed, panicked, less than half understanding what they were saying. “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me here! Please! I need you! God, I’m such a fool! Don’t! Don’t leave me!”

“I’m not. Shush, I’m not” Buffy assured him. “I’m never gonna leave you. It’s alright. It’s alright. I’m never gonna leave you. You’re stuck with me,” she joked seriously, “to the day you die.”

Giles sank into unconsciousness once more, mumbling incoherently. The bra cup bow flopped absurdly on the side of his head as he thrashed restlessly on the floor of the van. She couldn’t let him go into a public hospital in what might be his last moments on Earth looking like that. “Oz,” she called “Do you have a first aid kit? Bandages... anything?”

“No,” he said, “but we’ll be there in five minutes. It’s not bleeding now, I think maybe we should leave it alone.”

“I am not bringing him into an ER full of people with my bra tied around his head!” Buffy insisted hotly. Oz gave her an oddly affirmative shrug and tossed her a disused guitar strap. Giles’ head wound started bleeding again a little while she was rewrapping it, but it didn’t matter. They were there.

Buffy caught Giles up in her arms. This time he put his arms around her neck laid his head on her shoulder and called her ‘Grandmother’. His grip was very weak. He was slipping away. She was losing him. She ran through the Ambulance bay door into the hospital, frantically wailing “Somebody get a doctor!”

****

Kim waited a good long while after the demon fighter had stumbled out of the ally and off down the street, until she was sure he meant to stay gone, before doubling back. She stared in existential horror at Keri’s ashes. Of course, She didn’t actually know a word for what she felt, and if she’d had to come up with one it probably wouldn’t have been that. Three weeks ago she’d been a sophomore on the Fondren High pep squad. She’d skipped English class the day they’d talked about existential horror. But she felt the void of oblivion rising up to swallow her and even as her every instinct, human and demon, vowed to put it off as long as possible, she could hardly see the point.

And why should she mourn Keri? All of this was really Keri’s fault. Wasn’t she the one who’d said ‘Don’t fuck the guys at school, they’ll just talk about you behind your back and they don’t know what they’re doing anyway. Let’s go out to that club over in Sunnydale and pick up some real men.’ Well, they’d gotten fucked, that was for sure. And she was pretty sure nobody at school knew about it.

But Kim was pretty sure ‘real men’ didn’t send their girls out to fight vicious things like that psycho with the pointed cross telling them the whole time that they had the easy, safe job and it was going to be a piece of cake. Of course, she had gotten the job done. Kill or capture the Slayer’s (supposedly totally defenseless) mother while she’s off fighting somewhere else. That she had done. She could go back to Angel’s place secure in the knowledge that she would be rewarded and not punished.

But she wasn’t all that sure she wanted to go back. Except back in time maybe, about a month, back to a time when her life was enough fun that it didn’t have to have a point.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Normally I'm against footnoting references in fiction, but there is an alternate text of this poem floating around out there that fucks up the ending in the name of straightening out the meter. I couldn't help myself.
> 
> "They flee from me, that sometime did me  
> seek,  
> With naked foot stalking within my  
> chamber :  
> Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,  
> That now are wild, and do not once remember,  
> That sometime they have put themselves in danger  
> To take bread at my hand ; and now they range  
> Busily seeking in continual change. 
> 
> Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise  
> Twenty times better ; but once especial,  
> In thin array, after a pleasant guise,  
> When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,  
> And she me caught in her arms long and small,  
> And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,  
> And softly said, ' Dear heart, how like you this ?' 
> 
> It was no dream ; for I lay broad awaking :  
> But all is turn'd now through my gentleness,  
> Into a bitter fashion of forsaking ;  
> And I have leave to go of her goodness ;  
> And she also to use new fangleness.
> 
> But since that I unkindly so am served :  
> How like you this, what hath she now deserved ?" 
> 
> ~Sir Thomas Wyatt


	8. In Sheep’s Clothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Buffy learns that Xander has been brutally attacked and Joyce is nowhere to be found, she discovers the advantages of having a werewolf for an investigation partner.

“Dr. Wilkinson,” the voice repeated yet again, “Dr. Wilkinson to the ER.”

“There, you see,” Dr. Backer snorted sarcastically, “You _do_ have business of your own to mind. Now why don’t you go do your job and let me do mine.”

“I’ll be back,” she warned him hotly.

“Yes,” he replied dryly, “I have no doubt.” He watched her storm off, her ass giggling indignantly. That was really the only good thing about seeing Dr. Wilkinson. He spent the entirety of every conversation he had with the woman waiting for the opportunity to watch her walk away. 

She was anathema to him. She was the worst kind of coward, cautious to the point of being dangerous, without the imagination to contemplate the possibility that sometimes, when things were dangerous enough already, taking bold, daring action might actually be the safest thing you could do. She was the kind of doctor who would let a patient lay on her exam table and die with the medication that could save him sitting three feet away just because it hadn’t been FDA approved. 

Still, she did have a nice ass. An important quality in a woman who was capable of lighting up a room only by walking out of it.

“What have we got?” Dr. Wilkinson asked the nurse hurriedly as she entered the ER.

“Damn it, I’m fine!” the blonde girl was shouting at one of the army in scrubs. “Help _him_!” The man lay still and quiet on his gurney, to the point that it wasn’t encouraging. Dr. Wilkinson recognized the girl as Buffy Summers, the same girl the police had brought in three nights ago, the supposed kidnapping victim who’d miraculously lost her underpants and nothing else to her murderous sometimes boyfriend. She thought the mother had said that the father lived in Los Angeles.

“Well, it’s supposed to be an MVA,” the nurse was saying, “And he’s certainly lost enough blood, but the girl’s definitely been in a fight. We’re getting a type on him—”

“O positive,” said another scrub wearer on cue.

“Hang him a bag and put him in exam one. Call radiology,”Dr. Wilkinson instructed. “As soon as I deal with that head wound, we’re going to send him up for the works. Put Ms. Summers in exam three. She can wait. Where’s Dr. Heigel?”

“He has a high fever,” Buffy explained to the doctor urgently, ignoring the orderly’s attempts to put her where they were told. “It has to be the flu, I don’t think his wounds could have gotten infected that fast.”

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Wilkinson assured her as Giles was wheeled away. “Your dad’s in good hands.”

“He’s not my dad he’s my—librarian!” Buffy explained. She could hear that she sounded way too offended and that ‘librarian’ sounded dubbed in the way words like bumbleflubber get bleeped over motherfucker and cocksucker when they show R rated movies on network TV, but it was too late to do anything about it. There was too much else going on.

“He’s with the Harris kid,” the nurse called to the doctor, in answer to her earlier question, as she started to follow Giles’ stretcher away, “still trying to decide if there’s enough skin to sew back together or if he’s going to need grafts. The parents should be here any minute.”

“Wait, what Harris? Xander Harris?” Buffy asked, grabbing the doctor’s sleeve.

“If you want that man to live,” Dr. Wilkinson warned her impatiently, “let me go help him.”Buffy let her go. Her instincts told her to demand to go with them. She didn’t dare. She’d already said too much. If she didn’t watch her mouth, pretty soon everyone in Sunnydale would know that her ‘librarian’ was also her lover. That would be bad.  Like 'don't cross the streams' bad.

Instead she turn to interrogating the nurse. “What Harris kid?” she repeated.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “we can’t give out patient information.”

“Well, who brought him in?” Buffy demanded. “Was it my mom?” If he’d been with her mom, if there’d been an attack... Buffy wasn’t sure what anything meant right now, but it was nothing good.

The nurse looked puzzled and impatient at the same time, but all she said was, “If you’ll follow this gentleman to exam three, I’ll call your mother now. I can pull your chart from last weekend.” The nurse didn’t say that she was also calling the police, but Buffy saw the way she was looking at her fat, splintery lip and the finger-shaped bruises. It was too late anyway, they knew who she was, she’d just have to deal with the consequences of breaking curfew.

“I’m Fine,” Buffy repeated, “I’m just going to wait for him. He’s from another country. He doesn’t have anyone else. Just... when my mom gets here—”

“Parked,” Oz said, coming up behind her. “No easy task. Status?”

“They’re insisting I have to get checked out, they’re calling Mom. But Xander’s already here, at least I think he is, maybe badly hurt, these people won’t tell me anything.” The nurse looked like she was about to argue, but finally, some more patients came in, including two or three little kids with the flu bad enough to need IVs in a hurry. The staff stopped hassling Buffy to get checked out. She sat down with Oz to wait for her mom or the cops or whoever or whatever was coming next.

“How’s Giles?” he asked.

“They’re giving him blood,” Buffy answered.“They don’t know anything else yet, not that they’re even going to tell me when they do. God, this is horrible! I don’t know what to do, how to help him. I’m probably making everything worse just by even being here.”

“Probably,” Oz said in that way where it’s totally up to you to decide if you want him to be kidding or not.

“God! I wish Mom or the cops or whoever would just come already and do whatever they’re going to do!” Buffy declared miserably. They didn’t, but within five minutes Xander’s parents showed up. Tony was half drunk and pitching a fit and Jessica was only nine-tenths sober and not helping things any, but at least their conversation with the ER staff was loud and protracted enough for Buffy to gather that Xander had stumbled in under his own steam half shredded by ‘some kind of animal,’ and that he’d broken his hand in three places beating it off.

He hadn’t said anything about being with anyone when he was attacked, but he had suffered some kind of mysterious though apparently minor penis injury, possibly from falling down with his pants off so if he was hanging out, so to speak, with anyone, it was probably Cordelia.  It certainly wasn’t Buffy’s mom. Maybe he hadn’t done a very good job of distracting. Maybe Joyce knew damn well her daughter was out running around loose somewhere and that was why Giles had been rushing to her after all, to warn her, to hurry things along.

Oz was skeptical of this scenario. “I’ve never heard a woman tell a guy he can’t fix her flat tire,” he argued. “She should be just now wondering why her car won’t start. And from what I’ve seen of the vamp sense of humor, pantsing a guy so he falls on his pecker wouldn’t even qualify as mild teasing. Right now I’m think more like zombie football players.”

Now it was Buffy’s turn to be skeptical. “It’s a quarter to seven,” she pointed out. “If he took that long to get her tire changed, she probably did smell a rat. Maybe he was on his way home, or back to Giles when he got attacked. By whatever it was.

“Then how did Giles know to come after us?” Oz asked.

“Maybe Mom called him to check on me and she told him she was on her way,” Buffy speculated hopefully. “I mean, if she was with him, then she’d be here, or he’d have said something. Unless...” Looking slightly panicked, Buffy stood abruptly and walked back to the nurse’s desk. “Did you call my mom yet?” she asked.

“I left her a message,” the nurse said hurriedly, in the midst of a half dozen conversations. Buffy didn’t ask at home or at the Gallery. She was not accounted for, not about to arrive any minute. That was enough.  

“Oz—” she began. He showed her the keys he was already holding. They went and got in the van. Buffy hated to leave Giles after she’d promised she wouldn’t, but she didn’t hesitate about it either. She had to make sure her mom was okay. Besides, clearly _something_ had attacked Xander, something big and bad enough to deserve the attention of a Slayer. This was exactly the kind of leaving that Giles would understand.

****

Willow had ‘gone to bed’ well before the sunset. She couldn’t stay downstairs with the others. Besides her mother’s seething hatred and the Rabbi’s offensively professional assurance that all was as God would have it to be, she couldn’t take everyone else’s calm, resigned half simulated mourning. She also couldn’t sand waiting for some word or sign from Oz to tell her her father’s fate: worst or worser than worst.

She sat in her room, alone in the dark for hours, chanting the prayer for the dead. It stopped her from thinking and when she was really lost in it, kept her from noticing how much she hurt. By the time she heard the knock on the door and remembered what it meant she was so distracted from herself that she automatically responded with the incredibly stupid phrase that she’d been taught to say as a kid, “come in.”

The door opened. “Hey,” said a familiar voice from between familiar lips, smiling strangely nervously under beautiful worried eyes. “I just came to see if you needed anything.”

It was Amy.

“I don’t need anything,” Willow said automatically. Amy gave her a tender, doubtful look that drew her gaze, making it hard for her to lie, to hide. “Just...” Willow lowered her voice to less even than a whisper, “Stay with me a while?”

She did. Amy stayed all night with Willow. In her room. On her bed. Teaching her secret, forbidding things, of which neither her mother nor her Rabbi nor especially her father, would have approved.

****

They went to the Gallery first. If Buffy had gone home first and found Joyce already there she’d have had a hell of a time getting out again to try to find out anything about the attack on Xander. They soon saw that it wouldn’t have mattered. Someone had certainly gotten Joyce’s car started. It was totaled, smashed head-on into the front of the building. There was glass everywhere, not from the car, which had that sticky spider-webby safety glass they all have, but from the glass front door which was smashed in. The huge front window was also badly cracked. It hadn’t been hit directly, the brick around it had shifted and torqued it more than it could take. The whole façade was cracked and damaged.

“Mom!” Buffy shouted, leaping from the van before it came fully to rest. “Oh my God! Mom!” The car was empty. There was some blood in it but not nearly as much as you’d expect. At the moment of impact the driver had dug her very sharp fingernails into the soft leather cover of the steering wheel, ripping it to shreds. It’s hard to bleed fast when your heart’s not beating.

“Vampires?” Oz asked coming up behind.

“Vampires,” Buffy confirmed. “The blood’s mostly dry. I’m guessing this happened about an hour ago, but stay close to me, that doesn’t mean they’re gone.” Buffy hopped nimbly onto the hood of the car and back down again into the Gallery. A little less nimbly, Oz followed.

“We should call the police,” he said, when turning on the lights and walking through the building produced no sign of Joyce Summers. He was kind of surprised no one had already even in this more or less bedroomless part of town after what must have been a pretty loud crash not so late in the evening. Then again, it was an early to bed and mind your own business kind a town. For humans anyway.

“Hold on a minute,” Buffy instructed, walking deeper into the back office, “ _Something_ happened in here. Take a look at this.” Oz joined her behind Joyce’s desk. The combination blotter and calendar was wildly askew. There was a man’s belt thrown across it, the cheap cardboard and plastic kind. A pencil holder had been knocked over. His werewolf’s sense of smell gave him a lot more information than that. He’d never actually met Joyce Summers but what had happened, or at least started to happen, here had definitely involved a mature adult female closely related to Buffy. Dripping vaginal fluids in close proximity to a sweaty, beltless, sexually aroused Xander Harris. “If there was a struggle,” Buffy said worriedly,“it doesn’t look like she put up much of a fight.”

“I don’t think they came in here,” Oz said. Buffy looked up at him, puzzled. “I don’t smell any vampires,” he explained. “Werewolf thing.”

“Oh,” Buffy said, relieved he hadn’t guessed what a ridiculous thought had occurred to her when he’d said that, in light of the presence of the mysterious belt. God! She was turning into a regular pervert! Just because she and Giles suddenly couldn’t keep their hand off of each other was no reason to suppose that all of the rest of the world had gone equally crazy. There was absolutely a zero percent chance that Xander Harris would want to do it with her mom. Well... okay there was about a fifty-fifty chance that he would _want_ to do it with her mom, cuz she was a female under forty, but a less than zero percent chance that he’d try to do anything about it and even less that she’d let him.

“Wait a minute,” Buffy said, suddenly shocked in a totally different way, rapidly getting excited, enthused even. “You can smell where vampires _used_ to be? Do you think you could track them?”

Oz Shrugged. “I can try.”

****

Roberta Stott managed to be the one to take Rupert Giles up to Radiology. It was a fairly menial task for an RN in a busy hospital, but no one questioned that she had been assigned to it. Roberta was the kind of employee that someone was always impatiently ordering out of their hair. She stayed with him, through X-Rays, MRIs and minor surgeries. Another oddity that went unremarked. She had spent the last year cultivating a reputation for being stupid but obedient and hardworking. Someone to be trusted and generally relied upon, but expected to screw up at odd moments, to take inexplicable actions. By mistake. When it was discovered, if it was discovered, that no one had told her to be where she was, that in fact she had assigned work waiting elsewhere, she would crumple her great stupid brow and apologize and that would be that.

In any other town, that might not have been a workable strategy for job security, but the nationwide nursing shortage was worse in Sunnydale than anywhere. They could not do without even a Roberta Stott. She stayed with him, listening carefully, to make sure that, in the grip of fever and narcotics, he said nothing that any lurking agent of a dark power might gain an advantage to hear.

She remained by his bedside long after her ‘shift’ ended, serving her true master.

****

Drahl had noticed the woman in the last dumpsters on his regular evening rout, he most certainly had. Her skirt was bunched up around her thighs and her undergarments pulled down around her ankles, one shoe off and one shoe on. That wasn’t why he had noticed her. That was pretty normal.

He’d noticed her because she was breathing. Usually they weren’t. He shook his head a little. Drahl hated to see anything thrown out when there was still clearly so much wear left in it, but it was none of his business. Drahl wasn’t above dumpster diving, mind, not when someone threw out something nice. But he had no interest in a human female, especially a used one.

He’d emptied the receptacle into the bed of his truck and started back to the city dump. On the way, he’d had a better idea. One demon’s trash was another’s treasure, after all. A breathing human female, even in such poor condition, was bound to be worth money to someone. And Drahl was interested in money. He certainly was.

****

“It’s no good,” Oz said. “That dumpster stinks too much. They came here, all four of them. But I don’t know where anybody went.” Xander, at least, had come here in a completely different sense, but Oz kept that information to himself. It was even less his business than it was Buffy’s. She didn’t need to know.

“Vamp dust,” Buffy said sliding the toe of her shoe through a thin, sandy substance. “Not enough for two, I don’t think. And blood, a good bit of it. Oz, come sniff this; see if you can tell who did the bleeding.”

“Xander,”Oz said confidently when he had knelt and put his nose as close to the putrid ground as he could stand.

“He must have been fighting this one when the other one... got away.” Buffy concluded. Oz nodded, seeing no reason to finepoint what the vampire had gotten away with. Buffy needed to block the full realization a little while longer to be able to keep going. With every new bit of information they gathered, it was looking more and more like Joyce Summers was probably dead, like they’d be damned lucky, in fact, if she was just dead and not also about to rise as a vampire.

Oz was trying to block that realization himself. He’d been trying for weeks now to come to grips with the probability that he someday, despite his best precautions, he was likely to be the agent of an innocent person’s death, that he might kill a man, a woman, a child, a friend. He’d been pawing and sniffing at the idea, rolling around in it, getting used to its sent. He’d imagined what it would have meant if he had actually ripped open Theresa Klugsmyer, what he would or should have felt, what he might have been able to give himself permission not to feel. But the horror of Oz the killer had blindsided him just when he’d thought he had his guard up, from a completely unexpected direction. He’d just always assumed he’s have to be wolfed out of his mind to kill someone. He never thought it would happen because he'd had the bright idea to spike her tire and loosen her battery cables.

****

“A shoe?” the detective asked skeptically. It was Detective Sollers, the same one who was already investigating Angel’s recent murders. When he’d heard that a half dead Rupert Giles had been carried into the ER by a clearly battered Buffy Summers, he’d come faster than a priest on a mission to a whore house.

“That was all we found,” Buffy confirmed, “but it was her car, so obviously she didn’t just leave on her own.” He was interrogating Buffy in an empty break room not far from the ER, sitting on the bench next to her rather than across the picnic style table, trying to do the ‘my buddy the cop’ thing police always tried on kids. He wasn’t good at it.

“So your response to this... set of circumstances,” he persisted accusingly “was to drive all around town with the damned shoe until you happened to run into us?”

“We stopped by the house,” Buffy explained again, “Just to see if maybe she got away from... whatever happened and got home. Then we came here to see if maybe she’d been brought in.”

“Oh, _I_ see,” said Sollers sarcastically. “Well, now that that’s all completely cleared up, do you want to tell me what you were doing out running around Sunset Ridge after curfew with some guy in a van when you just _happened_ to come upon this ‘accident’ your boyfriend had nothing to do with?”

“He’s _not_ my boyfriend,” Buffy insisted, feeling like a broken record again, “And no, as far as I know he had nothing to do with Giles—Mr. Giles—running his car off the road. But I didn’t see it, so I guess anything’s possible.”

“Like for example, it’s possible you were with him tonight and he’s the one who did _that_ to you?” Sollers demanded, brushing the hair roughly back from Buffy’s neck. Her bruises had faded some in the last couple of hours, but the shapes of several fingers were still clearly visible.

“No,” said Buffy stiffly, “That’s not what happened.”

“Who was it then?” Sollers challenged, “The guy in the van?”

Buffy shook her head and looked down at her hands in her lap. “Oz is a friend,” she said quietly.

“Well maybe he did it to be ‘friendly’ huh?” the detective smirked. His tone was nasty, hateful even, yet dripping with sexual suggestion. Without further warning his hand was on Buffy’s thigh. Without even thinking she slammed his face again the tabletop hard enough to break his nose. When she heard the sick, wet cracking sound it made, Buffy realized her mistake. She should have fled from him, over or under the table or somewhere. She should have cried, or hollered for help. Now, here she was, alone in a room with an injured cop.

Panic deepened as Buffy recalled a phrase with which she’d become all too familiar over the past couple of years and of which she’d been reminded only about three days ago, ‘search incident to arrest.’ For once in her life, she wasn’t armed, but that wasn’t what was worrying her. Before Detective Sollers had quite recovered himself, while he was still cursing the goddamned-bitch-slut-motherfucking-cock-sucking-cunt who had refused to let him feel her up as a method of interrogation, not yet calling for backup to deal with the vicious delinquent who had attacked him for no good reason, Buffy hopped up and over the table, headed for the sink. It was either ten hours too late or two hours too early to take those three little pills, but it didn’t look like there was ever going to be a better time.

Buffy’s fingers writhed frantically inside her jacket pocket a full fifteen seconds after her brain told them they could stop, unable to accept the absence of what they didn’t feel. And then, all at once, it made much too much sense. She leaned against the sink, laughing, unable to breathe, unable to stop. She had been digging hard. She’d gotten hot. And stripped off her jacket. And thrown it onto a pile of dirt. Which was now filling Ira Rosenberg’s grave.

Buffy sat down cross-legged on the break room floor, buried her face in her hands and wept just a little. It didn’t matter. There was nothing she could do. Fate would have its way with her like it always did. She wiped her eyes, set her jaw and waited to be arrested.

 


End file.
